5r 



These essays on " The Literature of the Age 
of Elizabeth " were originally delivered as lec- 
tures before the Lowell Institute, in the spring 
of 1859, and were first printed in Tlie Atlantic 
Monthlij during the years 1867 and 1868. 



THE LITERATURE OF THE 
AGE OF ELIZABETH 



BT 



EDWIN P.: WHIPPLE 







hmmM97 



BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

1897 



//^-l^ 






Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1869, by 

FIELDS, OSGOOD & CO. 

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. 

Copyright, 1897, 
By CHARLOTTE B. WHIPPLE. 

A// rights reserved. 



CONTENTS. 



Chakacteristicsi op the Elizabethan Liteeatuee. — 

Maelowe 1 

Shakespeaee. I 32 

Shakespeaee. II 57 

Ben Jonson 85 

MiNOE Elizabethan Deamatists. — Heywood, Middleton, 

Maeston, Dekkae, Webstee, and Chapman . . . 119 

Beaumont and Fletchee, Massingee, and Foed . 157 

Spensee . . . . \ 189 

MiNOE Elizabethan Poets. — Phineas and Giles Fletch- 
ee, Daniel, Deayton, Waenee, Donne, Davies, Hall, 

WOTTON, AND HeEBEET . 221 

Sidney and Ealeigh 250 

Bacon. I 278 

5BAC0N. II. 306 

Hooker 340 



CHAEACTEEISTICS OF THE ELIZABETHAN 
LITEEATUEE. — MAELOWE. 

THE phrase " literature of the age of Elizabeth " is 
not confined to the literature produced in the reign 
of Elizabeth, but is a general name for an era in litera- 
ture, commencing about the middle of her reign, in 
1580, reaching its maturity in the reign of James I., 
between 1603 and 1626, and perceptibly declining dur- 
ing the reign of his son. It is called by the name of 
Elizabeth, because it was produced in connection with 
influences which originated or culminated in her time, 
and which did not altogether cease to act after hef 
death ; and these influences give to its great works, 
whether published in her reign or in the reign of James, 
certain mental and moral characteristics in common. 
The most glorious of all the expressions of the English 
mind, it is, like every other outburst of national genius, 
essentially inexplicable in itself. It occurred, but why 
it occurred we can answer but loosely. We can trace 
some of the influences which operated on Spenser, 
Shakespeare, Bacon, Hooker, and Ealeigh, but the 



2 CHARACTEEISTICS OF THE 

genesis of their genius is beyond our criticism. There 
was abundant reason, in the circumstances around them, 
why they should exercise creative power ; but the pos^ 
session of the power is an ultimate fact, and defies 
explanation. Still, the appearance of so many eminent 
minds in one period indicates something in the circum- 
stances of the period which aided and stimulated, if it 
did not cause, the marvel ; and a consideration of these 
circumstances, though it may not enable us to penetrate 
the mystery of genius, may still shed some light on its 
character and direction. 

^ The impulse given to the English mind in the age of 
Elizabeth was but one effect of that great movement 
of the European mind whose steps were marked by the 
revival of letters, the invention of printing, the study 
of the ancient classics, the rise of the middle class, the 
discovery of America, the Reformation, the formation 
of national literatures, and the general clash and con- 
flict of the old with the new, — the old existing in de- 
caying institutions, the new in the ardent hopes and 
organizing genius by which institutions are created. If 
the mind was not always emancipated from error during 
the stir and tumult of this movement, it was still stung 
into activity, and compelled to think ; for if authority, 
whether secular or sacerdotal, is questioned, authority 
no less than innovation instinctively frames reasons fot 



v/ 



ELIZABETHAN LITEKATURE. 3 

its existence. If power was thus driven to use the 
weapons of the brain, thought, in its attempt to become 
fact, was no less driven to use the weapons of force. 
Ideas and opinions were thus all the more directly per- 
ceived and tenaciously held, from the fact that they 
kindled strong passions, and frequently demanded, not 
merely the assent of the intellect, but the hazard of for- 
tune and life. 

At the time Elizabeth ascended the English throne, 
in 1558, the religious element of this movement had 
nearly spent its first force. There was a comparatively 
small band of intensely earnest Romanists, and perhaps 
a larger band of even more intensely earnest Puritans ; 
but the great majority of the people, though nominally 
Roman Catholics, were willing to acquiesce in the form 
given to the Protestant church by the Protestant state. 
To Elizabeth belongs the proud distinction of having 
been the head of the Protestant interest in Europe ; but 
the very word interest indicates a distinction between 
Protestantism as a policy and Protestantism as a faith ; 
and she did not hesitate to put down with a strong hand 
those of her subjects whose Protestantism most nearly 
agreed with the Protestantism she aided in France and 
Holland. The Puritan Reformers, though they repre- 
sented most thoroughly the doctrines and spirit of Lu- 
ther and Calvin, were thus opposed by the English 



4 CHAEACTERISTICS OF THE 

government, and were a minority of the English peopleo 
Had they succeeded in reforming the national Church, 
the national amusements, and the national taste, ac- 
cording to their ideas of reform, the history and the 
literature of the age of Elizabeth would have been 
essentially different ; but they would have broken the 
continuity of the national life. English nature, with 
its basis of strong sense and strong sensuality, was hos- 
tile to their ascetic morality and to their practical 
belief in the all-excluding importance of religious con- 
cerns. Had they triumphed then, their very earnest- 
ness might have made them greater, though nobler, 
tyrants than the Tudors or the Stuarts ; for they 
would have used the arm of power to force evan- 
gelical faith and austere morality on a reluctant and 
resisting people. Sir Toby Belch would have had to 
fight hard for his cakes and ale ; and the nose of Bar- 
dolph would have been deprived of the fuel that fed its 
fire. The Puritans were a great force in politics, as they 
afterwards proved in the Parliaments of Charles and 
the Commonwealth ; but in the time of Elizabeth they 
were politically but a faction, and a faction having at 
one time for its head the greatest scoundrel in England, 
the Earl of Leicester. They were a great force in lit- 
erature, as they afterwards proved by Milton and Bun- 
yan ; but their position towards what is properly called 



ELIZABETHAN LITERATUEE. 5 

the literature of the age of Elizabeth was strictly antag- 
onistical. The spirit of that literature, in its poetry, its 
drama, its philosophy, its divinity, was a spirit which 
they disliked in some of its forms, and abhorred in 
others. Their energies, though mighty, are therefore 
to be deducted from the mass of energies by which that 
literature was produced. 

And this brings us to the first and most marked char- 
acteristic of this literature, namely, that it is intensely__ 
"human. Human nature in its appetites, passions, im- 
perfections, vices, virtues ; in its thoughts, aspirations, 
imaginations ; in all the concrete forms of character in 
which it finds expression, in all the heights of ecstasy 
to which it soars, in all the depths of depravity to which 
it sinks, — this is what the Elizabethan literature rep- 
resents or idealizes ; and the total effect of this exhibi- 
tion of human life and exposition of human capacities, 
whether it be in the romance of Sidney, the poetry of 
Spenser, the drama of Shakespeare, the philosophy of 
Bacon, or the divinity of Hooker, is the wholesome and 
inspiring effect of beauty and cheer. This belief in hu- 
man nature, and tacit assumption of its right to expres- 
sion, could only have arisen in an age which stimulated 
human energies by affording fresh fields for their develop- 
ment, and in an age whose activity was impelled by a 
romantic and heroic, rather than a theological spirit. 



6 CHAEACTERISTICS OF THE 

And the peculiar position of Elizabeth compelled her, 
absolute as was her temper, to act in harmony with her 
people, and to allow individual enterprise its largest scope. 
Her revenue was altogether inadequate to cany on a war 
with Spain and a war with Ireland, to assist the Protes- 
tants of France and Holland, to inaugurate gr^at schemes 
of American colonization, to fit out expeditions to harass 
the colonies and plunder the commerce of Spain, — 
inadequate, in short, to make England a power of the 
first class. But the patriotism of her people, coinciding 
with their interests and love of adventure, urged them 
to undertake public objects as commercial speculations. 
They made war on her enemies for the spoils to be ob- 
tained from her enemies. Perhaps the most compre- 
hensive type of the period, representing most vividly 
the stimulants it presented to ambition and avarice, to 
chivalrous sentiment and greed of gain, to action and to 
thought, was Sir Walter Raleigh. Poet, historian, 
courtier, statesman, military commander, naval com- 
mander, colonizer, filibuster, he had no talent and no 
accomplishment, no virtue and no vice, which the time 
did not tempt into exercise. He participated in the 
widely varying ambitions of Spetiser and Jonson, of 
Essex and Leicester, of Burleigh, Walsingham, and Sir 
Nicholas Bacon, of Norris and Howard of Effingham, 
of Drake, Hawkins, and Cumberland; and in all the&e 
he was thoroughly human. 



ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE. 13 

the age. It was newspaper, magazine, novel, all in one. 
It was the Elizabethan " Times," the Elizabethan 
« Blackwood," the Elizabethan " Temple Bar " : it 
tempted into its arena equally the Elizabethan Thack- 
erays and the Elizabethan Braddons ; but the remuner- 
ation it afforded to the most distinguished of the swarm 
of playwrights who depended on it for bread was small. 
All experienced the full bitterness of poverty, if we ex- 
cept Shakespeare, Jonson, and Fletcher. Shakespeare 
was an excellent man of business, a part-proprietor of a 
theatre, and made his fortune. Jonson was patronized 
by James, and was as much a court poet as a popular 
poet. Fletcher, though the most fertile of the three in 
the number of his plays, and the greatest master of 
theatrical effect, did not, it is supposed, altogether de- 
pend on the stage for his support. But Chapman, Dek- 
kar. Field, E-owley, Massinger, and all the other pro- 
fessional playwrights, were wretchedly poor. And it 
must be said, that, though we are in the custom of 
affirming that the circumstances of the age of Elizabeth 
were pre-eminently favorable to literature, most of the 
writers, including such men as Spenser and Jonson, were 
in the habit of moaning or grumbling over its degeneracy, 
and of wishing that they had been born in happier times. 
There were, then, three centres for the literature 
of the period, — the Court, the Church, and the Theatre. 



14 CHAKACTERISTICS OF THE 

Let us consider the drama first, as it was nearer the 
popular heart, was the medium through which the 
grandest as well as meanest minds found expression, and 
was thoroughly national, or at least thoroughly nation- 
alized. 

England had a drama as early as the twelfth century, 
— a drama used by the priests as a mode of amusing 
the people into a knowledge of religion. Its products 
were called Miracle Plays. They were written, and 
often acted, by ecclesiastics ; they represented the per- 
sons and events of the Scriptures, of the apocryphal 
Gospels, and of the legends of saints and martyrs, and 
were performed sometimes in the open air, on tempo- 
rary stages and scaffolds, sometimes in churches and 
chapels. The earliest play of this sort of which w^e 
have any record was performed between the years 1100 
and 1110. The general characteristic of these plays, 
if we should speak after the ideas of our time, was 
blasphemy, and blasphemy of the worst kind ; for the 
irreverent utterance of sacred names is venial compared 
with the irreverent representation of sacred persons. 
The object of the writers was to bring Christianity 
within popular apprehension ; and in the process they 
burlesqued it. They belonged to a class of writers and 
speakers, as common now as then, who vulgarize the 
highest subjects in the attempt to popularize them,— 




ELIZABETHAN LITEEATURE 15 

who degrade religion in the attempt to make it efficient. 
The writers of the Miracle Plays only appear worse 
than their Protestant successors, from the greater rude- 
ness in the minds and manners to which they appealed, 
hey did not aim to lift the people up, but to drag the 
Divinity down ; and, not being in any sense poets, they 
could not make what was sacred familiarly apprehended, 
and at the same time preserve that ideal remoteness 
from ordinary life which is the condition of its being 
reverently apprehended. Their religious dramas, accord- 
ingly, were mostly monstrous farces, full of buffi)onery 
and indecency, though not without a certain coarse 
humor and power of characterization. Thus, in the 
play of the Deluge, Noah and his wife are close copies 
of contemporary character and manners, projected on 
the Bible narrative. Mrs. Noah is a shrew and a 
vixen ; refuses to leave her gossips and go into the' ark ; 
scolds Noah, and is soundly whipped by him ; then 
wishes herself a widow, and thinks she but echoes the 
feeling of all the wives in the audience, in hoping for 
them the same good luck. Noah then takes occasion to 
inform all the husbands present that their proper course 
is to break in their wives after his fashion. By this 
time the water is nearly up to his wife's neck, and she 
is partly coaxed and partly forced into the ark by one 
of her sons. Again, in a play on the Adoration of the 



16 CHAEACTERISTICS OF THE 

Shepherds, the shepherds are three English boors, who 
meet with a variety of the most coarsely comical adven- 
tures in their journey to Bethlehem ; who, just before 
the star in the east appears, get into a quarrel and fight, 
after having feasted on Lancashire jammocks and Hal- 
ton ale ; and who, when they arrive at their destination, 
present three gifts to the infant Saviour, namely, a bird, 
a tennis-ball, and a bob of cherries. 

The Miracle Plays were very popular, and did not 
altogether die out before the reign of James. In some 
of them personified abstractions came to be blended 
with the persons of the drama ; and in the fifteenth 
century a new class of dramatic « performances arose, 
called Moral Plays, in which these personified abstrac- 
tions pushed persons out of the piece, and ethics sup- 
planted theology. There is, in some of these Moral 
Plays, a great deal of ingenuity displayed in the 
impersonation and allegorical representation of quali- 
ties. They took strong hold of the English mind. 
Pride, gluttony, sensuality, j^orldliness, meekness, tem- 
perance, faith, in their single and in their blended 
action, were often happily characterized ; and, though 
they were eventually banished from the drama, they 
reappeared in the pageants of Elizabeth and in the 
poetry of Spenser. But their popularity was doubtless 
owing more to their fun than their ethics ; and the two 



ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE. 17 

characters of the Devil and Vice, the laughable monster 
and the laughable buffoon, were the darlings of the 
multitude. In Ben Jonson's " Staple of News," Gossip 
Tattle exclaims : " My husband, Timothy Tattle, God 
rest his soul ! was wont to say that there was no play 
without a fool and a Devil in 't : he was for the Devil 
still, God bless him ! The Devil for his money, he 
would say ; I would fain see the Devil." 

Nearer to the modern Play than either the Miracle 
or the Moral, was the Interlude, so called from its being 
acted in the intervals of a banquet. It was a farce 
in one act, and devoted to the humorous and satirical 
representation of contemporary manners and charac- 
ter, especially professional character. John Ileywood, 
the jester of Henry VIIL, was the best maker of these 
Interludes. 

At the time that all of these three forms of the drama 
^were more or less in esteem, Nicholas Udall, a classical 
scholar, produced, about the year 1540, the first English 
comedy, "Ralph Roister Doister," — very much supe- 
rior, in incident and characterization, to " Gammer Gur- 
ton's Needle," written twenty years afterwards, though 
neither rises above the mere prosaic delineation, the 
first of civic, the last of country life. The poetic ele- 
ment, which was afterwards so conspicuous in the Eliza- 
bethan drama, did not even appear in the first English 

B 



18 CHARACTEKISTICS OF THE 

tragedy, " Gorboduc," though it was written by Thomas 
Sackville, the author of the Induction to the " Mirror 
of Magistrates," and the only great poet that arose be- 
tween Chaucer and Spenser. " Gorboduc " was acted 
before Queen Ehzabeth at Whitehall, by the Gentlemen 
of the Inner Temple, in January, 1562. It was re- 
ceived with great applause ; but it appears, as read now, 
singularly frigid and unimpassioned, with not even, as 
Campbell says, " the unities of space and time to cir- 
cumscribe its dulness." It has all the author's justness, 
weight, and fertility of thought, but little of his imagi- 
nation ; and though celebrated as the first English play 
written in blank verse, the measure, in Sackville's hands, 
is wearisomely monotonous, and conveys no notion of 
the elasticity and variety of which it was afterwards 
found capable, when used by Marlowe and Shakespeare. 
The tragedy is not deficient in terrible events, but even 
its murders make us yawn. 

It is probable that the fifty-two plays performed at 
court between 1568 and 1580, and of which nothing is 
preserved but the names, contained little to make us 
regret their loss. Neither at the Royal Palace, nor the 
Inns of Court, nor the Universities, — at all of which 
plays were performed, — could a free and original national 
drama be built up. This required a public theatre, and 
an audience composed of all classes of the people. Ac- 



ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE. 19 

cordiDgly, tlie most important incident in the history of 
the English stage was the patent granted by the crown, 
in 1574, to James Burbage and his associates, players 
under the protection of the Earl of Leicester, to per- 
form in the City and Liberties of London, and in all 
other parts of the kingdom ; " as well," the phraseology 
runs, " for the recreation of our loving subjects, as for 
our own solace and pleasure, when we shall think fit to 
see them." 

But the Corporation of London, thorough Puritans, 
were determined, as far as their power extended, to 
prevent the Queen's subjects from having any such 
" recreation," and her Majesty herself from enjoying 
any such " solace and pleasure." " Forasmuch as the 
playing of interludes, and the resort to the same, are 
very dangerous for the infection of the plague, whereby 
infinite burdens and losses to the city may increase ; and 
are very hurtful in corruption of youth with inconti- 
nence and lewdness ; and also great wasting both of the 
time and thrift of many poor people ; and great provok- 
ing of the wrath of God, the ground of all plagues ; 
great withdrawing of the people from public prayer, 
and from the service of God ; and daily cried out against 
by all preachers of the word of God ; — therefore," the . 
Corporation ordered, " all such interludes in public 
places, and the resort to the same, shall wholly be pro- 



20 CHARACTEEISTICS OF THE 

hibited as ungodly, and humble suit made to the Lords, 
that like prohibitation be in places near the city." 

The players, thus expelled the city, withdrew to the 
nearest point outside the Lord Mayor's jurisdiction, and, 
in 1576, erected their theatre in Blackfriars. Two thea- 
tres, " The Curtain " and " The Theatre," were erected 
by other companies in Shoreditch. Before the end of 
the century there were at least eleven. To these round 
wooden buildings, open to the sky, with only a thatched 
roof over the stage, the people flocked daily for mental 
excitement. There was no movable scenery ; the female 
characters were played by boys ; and the lowest thea- 
tres of our day are richer in appointments than were the 
finest of the age of Elizabeth. " Such," says Malone, 
" was the poverty of the old stage, that the same person 
played two or three parts ; and battles on which the 
fate of an empire was supposed to depend were decided 
by three combatants on a side." It is difficult for us to 
conceive of the popularity of the stage in those days. 
One of the spies of Secretary Walsingham, writing to 
his employer in 1586, thus groans over the taste of the 
people : " The daily abuse of stage plays is such an 
offence to the godly, and so great a hindrance to the 
Gospel, as the Papists do exceedingly rejoice at the 
blemish thereof, and not without cause ; for every day 
in "the week the player's bills are set up in sundry places 



ELIZABETHAN LITERATUEE. 21 

of the city ; .... so that, when the bells toll to the 
lecturer, the trumpets sound to the stages. Whereat 
the wicked faction of Rome laugheth for joy, while the 

godly weep for sorrow It is a woful sight to see 

two hundred proud players jet in their silks, while five 

hundred poor people starve in the streets Woe 

is me ! the play-houses are pestered when the churches 
are naked. At the one, it is not possible to get a place ; 
at the other, void seats are plenty." It may here be 
said, that the mutual hostility of the players and the 
Puritans continued until the suppression of the theatres 
under the Commonwealth ; and for fifty or sixty years 
the Puritans were only mentioned by the dramatists to 
be mercilessly satirized. Even Shakespeare's catholic 
mind was^ not broad enough to include them in the 
range of its sympathies. 

That this opposition to the stage by the staid and 
sober citizens was not without cause, soon became mani- 
fest. The characteristic of the drama, before Shake- 
speare, was intellectual and moral lawlessness ; and 
most of the dramatists were men as destitute of eminent 
genius as of common principle. Stephen Gosson, a 
Puritan, in a tract published in 1581, attacks them on 
grounds equally of taste and morals ; and five years 
afterwards Sir Philip Sidney speaks of the popular 
plays as against all " rules of honest civility and skilful 



22 CHARACTERISTICS OF THE 

poetry." But Gosson indicates also the sources of their 
plots. Painter's " Palace of Pleasure," a series of not 
over-modest tales from the Italian ; " The Golden Ass " ; 
" The Ethiopian History " ; " Amadis of France " ; "The 
Round Table " ; — all the licentious comedies in Latin, 
French, Italian, and Spanish were thoroughly ran- 
sacked, he tells us, " to furnish the play-houses of Lon- 
don." The result, of course, was a chaos ; but a chaos 
whose materials were wide and various, indicating that 
the English mind was in contact with, and attempting 
roughly .to reproduce, the genius of Greece and Rome^ 
of France, Spain, and Italy, the chronicles and ro- 
mances of the Middle Ages, and was hospitable to intel- 
lectual influences from all quarters. What was needed 
was the powerful personality and shaping imagination of 
genius, to fuse these seemingly heterogeneous materials 
into new and original forms. " The Faerie Queene " 
of Spenser, and the drama of Shakespeare, evince 
the same assimilation of incongruous elements which 
Gosson derides and denounces as it appeared in the 
shapeless works of mediocrity. There was not merely 
to be a new drama, but a new art, and new principles 
of criticism to legitimate its creative audacities. The 
materials were rich ani various. The difficulty was, 
that to combine them into original forms required genius, 
and genius higher, broader, more energetic, more imagi- 



ELIZABETHAN LITEEATURE 23 

native, and more humane tban had ever before been 
directed to dramatic composition. 

The immediate predecessors of Shakespeare — Greene, 
Lodge, Kyd, Peele, Marlowe>P^ Were all educated at 
the Universities, and weref naturally prejudiced in favor 
of the classics. But they were, at the same time, wild 
Bohemian youths, thrown upon the world of London to 
turn their talents and accomplishments into the means 
of livelihood or the means of debauch. They depended 
principally on the popular theatres, and of course a,d- 
dressed the popular mind. Why, indeed, should they 
write according to the rules of the classic drama ? The 
classic drama was a growth from the life of the times in 
which it appeared. Its rules were simply generaliza- 
tions from the practice of classic dramatists. A drama 
suited to the tastes and wants of the people of Greece 
or Rome was evidently not suited to the tastes and 
wants of the people of England. The whole frame- 
work of society, — customs, manners, feelings, aspira- 
tions, traditions, superstitions, religion, — had changed ; 
and, as the drama is a reflection of life, either as actu- 
ally existing or ideally existing, it is evident that both 
the experience and the sentiments of the English audi- 
ences demanded that it should be the reflection of a 
new life. These draniatists, however, in emancipating 
themselves from the literary jurisprudence of Greece 



24 CHARACTEEISTICS OF THE 

and Rome, put little but individual caprice in its place. 
Released from formal rules, they did not rise into the 
artistic region of principles, but fell into the pit of anar- 
chy and mere lawlessness. Lacking the higher imagi- 
nation which conceives living" ideas and organizes living 
works, their dramas evince no coherence, no subordina- 
tion of parts, no grasp of the subject as a whole. There 
is a German play in which Adam is represented as pass- 
ing across the stage, " going to be created." The drama 
of the age of Elizabeth, in the persons of Greene, 
Peele, Kyd, and others, indicates, in some such rude 
way, that it is " going to be created." 

That this dramatic shapelessness was not inconsistent 
with single poetic conceptions of the greatest force and 
fineness, might be proved by abundant quotations. 
Lodge, for example, was a poor dramatist ; but what 
living poet would not be proud to own this exquisite 
description, in his lyric of " Rosaline," of the person 
and influence of beauty ? 

" Like to the clear in highest sphere, 
Where all imperial glory shines, 
Of selfsarae color is her hair, 
Whether unfolded or in twines. 

" Her eyes are sapphires set in snow, 
Refining heaven by every wink ; 
The gods do fear whenas they glow. 
And I do tremble when I think. 



ELIZABETHAN LITEEATURE. 25 

*' Her cheeks are like the blushing cloud 

That beautifies Aurora's face; 
Or like the silver-crimson shroud, 
That Phoebus' smiling looks doth grace 

" Her lips are like two budded roses, 
Whom ranks of lUies neighbor nigh, 
-Within which bounds she balm encloses, 
Apt to entice a deity. 

'^ Her neck like to a stately tower, 

Where Love himself imprisoned lies. 
To watch for glances every hour 
From her divine and sacred eyes. 

" With orient pearl, with ruby red, 

With marble white, with sapphire blue, 
Her body everyway is fed, 
Yet soft in touch, and sweet in view. 

" Nature herself her shape admu-es ; 
The gods are wounded in her sight ; 
And Love forsakes his heavenly fires, 
And at her eyes his brand doth light." 

But a more potent spirit than any we have men^ 
tioned, and the greatest of Shakespeare's predecessors, 
was Christopher Marlowe, a man of humble parentage, 
but with Norman blood in his brains, if not in his veins. 
He was, indeed, the proudest and fiercest of intellectual 
aristocrats. The son of a shoemaker, and born in 1564, 
his unmistakable genius seems to have gained him 
2 



26 MARLOWE. 

friends, who looked after his early education, and sent 
him, at the age of seventeen, to the University of Cam- 
bridge. He ^ was intended for the Cliurch, but the 
Church had evidently no attractions for him. The study 
of theology appears to have resulted in making him an 
enemy of religion. There was, indeed, hardly a Chris- 
tian element in his untamable nature ; and, though he 
was called a sceptic, infidelity in him took the form of 
blasphemy rather than of denial. He was made up 
of vehement passions, vivid imagination, and lawless 
self-will ; and what Hazlitt calls " a hunger and thirst 
after unrighteousness " assumed the place of conscience 
in his haughty and fiery spirit. Before the age of 
twenty-three we find him in London, an actor and a 
writer for the stage, and the author of the " great sensa- 
tion work " of his time, — the tragedy of " Tambur- 
laine." This portentous melodrama, a strange com- 
pound of inspiration and desperation, has the mark of 
power equally on its absurdities and its sublimities. The 
first play written in blank verse for the popular stage, 
its verse has an elasticity, freedom, and variety of move- 
ment which makes it as much the product of Marlowe's 
mind as the thoughts and passions it conveys. It had 
no precedent in the verse of preceding writers, and is 
constructed, not on mechanical rules, but on vital prin- 
ciples. It is the efl:brt of a glowing mind, disdaining to 



MAELOWE. 27 

creep along paths previously made, and opening a new 
path for itself. This scornful intellectual daring, the 
source of Marlowe's originality, is also the source of his 
defects. In the tragedy of " Tamburlaine " he selects 
for his hero a character through whom he can express 
his own extravagant impatience of physical obstacles 
and moral restraints. No regard is paid to reality, even 
in the dramatic sense of the word : a shaggy and savage 
force dominates over everything. The writer seems to 
say, with his truculent hero, " This is my mind, and I 
will have it so." This self-asserting intellectual inso- 
lence is accompanied by an unwearied energy, which 
half redeems the bombast into which it runs, or rather 
rushes ; and strange gleams of the purest splendors of 
poetry are continually transfiguring the bully into the 
bard. 

Thus, in the celebrated scene in which Tamburlaine 
is represented in a chariot drawn by captive kings, and 
berating them for their slowness in words which so cap- 
tivated Ancient Pistol, there is a glorious stroke of 
impassioned imagination, which makes us almost forgive 
the swaggering fustian which precedes and follows it : — 

" Hallo ! ye pampered jades of Asia ! 
What, can ye draw but twenty miles a day ? — 

The horse that guide the golden eye of heaven, 



28 MARLOWE. 

And blow the morning from their nostrils, 
Making their fiery gait above the clouds, 
Are not so honored in their governor 
As you, ye slaves, in mighty Tamburlaine." 

« Faustus," " The Jew of Malta," " Edward the Sec- 
ond," " The Massacre of Paris," " Dido, Queen of Car- 
thage," are the names of Marlowe's remaining plays. 
They all, more or less, exhibit the eager creativeness 
of his mind, and the furious arrogance of his disposition. 
" They abound," says Hunt, " in wilful and self-worship- 
ping speeches, and every one of them turns upon some 
kind of ascendency at the expense of other people." 
His " Edward the Second " is the best historical play 
written before Shakespeare's, and exhibits more discrim- 
ination in delineating character than any of Marlowe's 
other efforts. His " Jew of Malta " is a powerful con- 
ception, marred in the process of embodiment. His 
" Faustus " perhaps best reflects his whole genius and 
experience. The subject must have taken strong hold 
of his nature, for, like Faustus, he had himself doubt- 
less held intimate business relations with the great 
enemy of mankind, and was personally conscious of the 
struggle in the soul between the diabolical and the di- 
vine. The characters of Faustus and Mephistopheles 
are both conceived with great depth and strength of 
imagination ; and the last scene of the play, exhibiting 



MARLOWE. 29 

the agony of supernatural terror in which Faustus 
awaits the coming of the fiend who has bought and 
paid for his soul, is not without touches of sublimitja 
There is one line, especially, which is loaded with 
meaning and suggestiveness, — that in which harbor- 
ing for a moment the possibility of salvation amid the 
gathering horrors of his doom, Faustus exclaims, — 

" See where Christ's blood streams in the firmament! " 

Marlowe's life, though short and reckless, was fertile in 
works. Besides the plays we have mentioned, he prob- 
ably wrote many which have been lost ; and his trans- 
lations from Ovid, and his unfinished poem of " Hero 
and Leander," would alone give him a position among 
the poets of his period. He was killed in a tavern 
brawl, in the year 1593, at the early age of twenty-nine.* 

* Beard, in his "Theatre of God's Judgments" (1597), makes his 
death the occasion to point a ferocious moral. He speaks of him as 
" by practice a play-maker and a poet of scurrilitie, who, by giuing 
too large a swing to his owne wit, and suffering his lust to haue the 
fall reines," at last " denied God and his somie Christ, and not onely 
in word blasphemed the Trinitie, but also (as it is credibly reported) 
wrote bookes against it, affirming our Sauiour to be but a deceiuer, 
and Moses to be but a coniurer and seducer of the people, and the 
Holy Bible to bee but vaine and idle stories, and aU religion but a 
deuice of policie. But see what a hooke the Lord put in the nostrils 
of this barking dogge I So it fell out, that, as he purposed to stab 
one whom he ought a grudge vnto, wiln his dagger, the other party 



30 MAELOWE. 

Though Marlowe's poetical contemporaries and follow- 
ers could say little or nothing in defence of his life, 
when it was mercilessly assailed by Puritan pamphlet- 
eers, there was no lack of testimonials to his genius. 
Ben Jonson celebrated " his mighty line " ; Drayton de- 
scribed his raptures as " all fire and air," and testified 
to his possession of those " brave, sublunary things that 
the first poets had"; and Chapman, with a yet closer 
perception of his unwithholding self-committal to the 

Muse, said that 

"He stood 
Up to the diin in the Pierian flood." 

A still higher tribute to his eminence comes from 
Shakespeare himself, who, in his "As You Like It," 
quotes with approval a line from Marlowe's poem of 
" Hero and Leander," — the only case in which Shake- 
speare has publicly recognized the genius of an Eliza- 
bethan writer. 

perceiuing so auoyded the stroke, that withall catching hold of his 
wrist, hee stabbed tiis owne dagger into his owne head, in such sort 
that, notwithstanding all the meanes of surgerie that could bee 
wrought, hee shortly after died thereof ; the manner of his death 
being so terrible (for he euen cursed and blasphemed to his last gape, 
and together with his breath an oath flew out of his mouth), that it 
was not only a manifeste signe of God's judgement, but also an hoi'- 
Tible and fearefull terror to all that beheld him. But herein did the 
justice of God most noteably appeare, in that hee compelled his owne 
hand, which had written these blasphemies, to bee the instrument to 
punish him, and that in his braine which had deuised the same." 



MAELOWE. 31 

But this stormy, irregular genius, compound of Alsa- 
tian ruffian and Arcadian singer, whose sudden death, 
in the height of his glory and his pride, seemed to 
threaten the early English drama with irreparable loss, 
was to be succeeded in his own walk by the greatest 
Englishman, by the greatest man, that ever made the 
theatre or literature his medium of communication with 
the world. To some thoughts on this man — need we 
say it is Shakespeare ? — we shall invite the attention 
of the reader in the next chapter. 



SHAKESPEAEE. 



I. 



rriHE biography of Shakespeare, if we merely look at 
the bulk of the books which assume to record it, is 
both minute and extensive ; but when we subject the 
octavo or quarto to examination, we find a great deal 
that is interesting about his times, and some shrewd and 
some dull guessing-about his probable actions and mo- 
tives, but little about himself except a few dates. He 
was born in Stratford-on-Avon, in April, 1564, and was 
the son of John Shakespeare, tradesman, of that place. 
In 1582, in his nineteenth year, he married Anne Hath- 
away, aged twenty-six. About the year 1586 he went 
to London and became a player. In 1589 he was one 
of the proprietors of the Blackfriars Theatre, and in 
1595 was a prominent shareholder in a larger theatre, 
built by the same company, called the Globe. As a 
playwright he seems to have served an apprenticeship ; 
for he altered, amended, and added to the dramas of 
others before he produced any himself. Between the 
year 1591, or thereabouts, and the year 1613, or 
thereabouts, he wrote over thirty plays, the precise date 



SHAKESPEARE. 33 

of whose composition it is hardly possible to fix. He 
seems to have made yearly visits to Stratford, where his 
wife and children resided, and to have invested money 
there as he increased in wealth. Mr. Emerson has 
noted, that about the time he was writing Macbeth, per- 
haps the greatest tragedy of ancient or modern times, 
" he sued Philip Rogers, in the borough-court of Strat- 
ford, for thirty-five shillings tenpence, for corn delivered 
to him at various times." In 1608, Mr. Collier esti- 
mates his income at four hundred pounds a year, which, 
allowing for the decreased value of money, is equal to 
eight or nine thousand dollars at the present time. 
About the year 1610, he retired permanently to Strat- 
ford, though he continued to write plays for the com- 
pany with which he was connected. He died on the 
23d of April, 1616. 

Such is essentiallj' the meagre result of a century of 
research into the external life of Shakespeare. As 
there is hardly a p^^ge in his writings which does not 
shed more light upon the biography of his mind, and 
bring us nearer to the individuality of the man, the an- 
tiquaries in despair have been compelled to abandon 
him to the psychologists ; and the moment the transition 
from external to internal facts is made, the most obscure 
of men passes into the most notoricus. For this person- 
ality and soul we call Shakespeare, ^he recorded inci- 

2* C 



34 SHAKESPEARE. 

dents of whose outward career were so few and trifling, 
lived a more various life — a life more crowded with 
ideas, passions, volitions, and events — than any poten- 
tate the world has ever seen. Compared with his ex- 
perience, the experience of Alexander or Hannibal, of 
Caesar or Napoleon, was narrow and one-sided. He 
had projected himself into almost all the varieties of 
human character, and, in imagination, had intensely 
realized and lived the life of each. From the throne 
of the monarch to the bench of the village alehouse, 
there were few positions in which he had not placed 
himself, and which he had not for a time identified with 
his own. No other man had ever seen nature and hu- 
man life from so many points of view ; for he had looked 
upon them through the eyes of Master Slender and 
Hamlet, of Caliban and Othello, of Dogberry and Mark 
Antony, of Ancient Pistol and Julius Caesar, of Mistress 
Tearsheet and Imogen, of Dame Quickly and Lady Mac- 
beth, of Robin Goodfellow and Titania, of Hecate and 
Ariel. No king or queen of his time had so completely 
felt the cares and enjoyed the dignity of the regal state 
as this playwright, who usurped it by his thought alone ; 
and the freshest and simplest maiden in Europe had no 
innocent heart-experience which this man could not 
share, — escaping, in an instant, from the shattered brain 
of Lear, or the hag-haunted imagination of Macbeth, in 



SHAKESPEAEE. 35 

order to feel the tender flutter of her soul in his own. 
And none of these forms, though mightier or more ex- 
quisite than the ordinary forms of humanity, could hold 
or imprison him a moment longer than he chose to abide 
in it. He was on an excursion through the world of 
thought and action, to seize the essence of all the ex- 
citements of human nature, — terrible, painful, criminal, 
rapturous, or humorous ; and to do this in a short 
earthly career, he was compelled to condense ages into 
days, and lives into minutes. He exhausts, in a short 
time, all the glory and all the agony there is on the 
throne or on the couch of Henry IV., and then, wearied 
with royalty, is off to the Boar's Head to have a rouse 
with Sir John. He feels all the flaming pride and scorn 
of the aristocrat Coriolanus; his brain widens with the 
imperial ideas, and his heart beats with the measureless 
ambition, of the autocrat Caesar; and anon he has 
donned a greasy apron, plunged into the roaring Roman 
mob, and is yelling against aristocrat and autocrat with 
all the gusto of democratic rage. He is now a prattling 
child, and in a second he is the murderer with the knife 
ftt its throat. Capable of heing all that he actually or 
imaginatively sees, he enters into at will, and abandons 
at will, the passions that brand or blast other natures. 
Avarice, malice, envy, jealousy, hatred, revenge, remorse, 
neither in their separate nor mutual action are strong 



36 SHAKESPEARE. 

enough to fasten him ; and the same may be said of love 
and pity and friendship and joy and ecstasy ; for behind 
and within this muUiform personaUty is the person 
Shakespeare, — serene, self-conscious, vigilant, individ- 
ualizing the facts of his consciousness, and pouring his 
own soul into each creation, without ever parting with 
the personal identity which is at the heart of all, which 
disposes and co-ordinates all, and which dictates the 
impression to be left by all. 

And this fact conducts us to the question of Shake- 
speare's individuality. We are prone to place him as a 
man below other great men, because we make a distinc- 
tion between the man and his genius. We gather our 
notion of Shakespeare from the meagre details of his 
biography, and in his biography he appears little and 
commonplace, — not by any means so striking a person 
as Kit Marlowe or Ben Jonson. To this individuality 
we tack on a universal genius, — which is about as rea- 
sonable as it would be to take the controlling power of 
gravity from the sun and attach it to one of the aste- 
roids. Shakespeare's genius is not something distinct 
from the man ; it is the expression of the man, just as 
the sun's attraction is the result of its immense mass. 
The measure of a man's individuality is his creative 
power ; and all that Shakespeare created he individually 
included. We must, therefore, if we desire to grasp hij 



SHAKESPEAEE. 37 

greatness, discard from our minds all associations con- 
nected with the pet epithets which other authors have 
condescended to shower upon him, such as " Sweet 
Will," and " Gentle Shakespeare," and " Fancy's child," 
— fond but belittling phrases, as little appropriate as 
would be the patronizing chatter of the planet Venus 
about the dear, darling little Sun; — we must discard 
all these from our conceptions, and consider him prima- 
rily as a vast, comprehensive, personal soul and force, 
that passed from eternity into time, with all the wide 
aptitudes and affinities for the world he entered bound 
up in his individual being from the beginning. These 
aptitudes and affinities, these quick, deep, and varied 
sympathies, were so many inlets of the world without 
him ; and facts pouring into such a nature were swiftly 
organized into faculties. Nothing, indeed, amazes us so 
much, in the biography of Shakespeare's mind, as the 
preternatural rapidity with which he assimilated knowl- 
edge into power, and experience into insight. The 
might of his personality is indicated by its resistance to, 
as much as its breadth is evinced by its receptivity of, 
objects ; for his force was never overwhelmed or sub- 
merged by the multiplicity of impressions that unceas- 
ingly rushed in upon it. His soul lay genially open to 
the world of nature and human life, to receive the ob- 
jects that went streaming into it, but Clever parted with 



38 SHAKESPEAEE. 

the power of reacting upon all it received. This would 
not be so marvellous had he merely taken in the forms 
and outside appearances of things. All his perceptions, 
however, were vital ; and the life and force of the ob- 
jects he drew into his consciousness tugged with his 
own life and force for the mastery, and ended in simply 
enriching the spirit they strove to subdue. This inde- 
structible spiritual energy, which becomes mightier with 
every exercise of might ; which plucks out the heart 
and absorbs the vitality of everything it touches ; which 
daringly commits itself to the fiercest, and joyously to 
the softest passions, without losing its moral and mental 
sanity; which in the most terrible excitements is as 
" tlie blue dome of air " to the tempest that rages be- 
neath it ; which, aiming to include everything, refuses 
to be included by anything, and in the sweep of its 
creativeness acts with a confident audacity, as if in it 
Nature were humanized and humanity individualized ; — 
in short, this unexampled energy of blended sensibility, 
intelligence, and will, is what constitutes the man Shake- 
speare ; and this man is no mere name for an impersonal, 
unconscious genius, that did its marvels by instinct, no 
name for a careless playwright who blundered into mir- 
acles, but is essentially a person, creating strictly within 
the limitations of his individuality, — within those limi- 
tations appearing to be impersonal only because he is 



SHAKESPEAEE. 39 

compreliensive enough to cover a wide variety of special 
natures, — and, above all, a person individually as great, 
at least, as tlie sum of his whole works. 

In regard to the real mystery of this man's power, 
both criticism and philosophy are mute. His appear- 
ance is simply a fact in the world's intellectual history, 
which can be connected with no preceding fact nor with 
the spirit of his age. " It is the nature of poetry," 
says Emerson, " to spring, like the rainbow daughter of 
Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past, and to 
refuse all history." All that we know is, that the ca- 
pacities and splendors of Shakespeare's mind existed 
potentially in the vital germ of the spiritual nature born 
with him into the world ; and that his works are the 
result of the unfolding of this. The glory of the Eliza- 
bethan age, it is absurd to call him its product, for the 
puzzle is not so much the peculiarities of what he assim- 
ilated as his powers of assimiliation, and in any age 
these powers would probably have worked equal, if 
different effects. Take, for instance, single thoughts 
and imaginations of his, such as the following, and see 
if you can account for them by any knowledge you have 
of the manners and customs of the England of Eliza- 
beth : — 

" The morning steals upon the night, 
Melting the darkness." 



40 SHAKESPEAEE. 

" How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! '* 

" The benediction of these covering heavens 
Fall on their heads like dew." 

Things evil " are our outward consciences." 

A substitute shines brightly as a king, 
Until a king be by; and then his state 
Empties itself, as doth an inland brook 
Into the main of waters." 

Westmoreland ! thou art a summer bird, 
Which ever in the haunch of winter sings 
The lifting up of day." 

" Cheer your heart : 
Be you not troubled with the time, which drives 
O'er your content these strong necessities; 
But let determined things to Destiny 
Hold mibewailed their way." 

But single passages like these, though they hint of 
the inmost essence of the poet, and drop upon the mind, 
as Carlyle says, " like a splendor out of heaven," — 
though they demonstrate the independence of time and 
place of the imagination whence they come, -^- are still 
no adequate measure of Shakespeare's power. If, how- 
ever, we pass from these to what is a more decisive 
test of his self-conscious, self-directed creative energy, 
namely, to his mode of organizing a whole drama, we 
shall find that his method, processes, and results are 



SHAKESPEARE. 41 

different from those of the draraatists of his own age or 
of any other age. The materials he uses are as nothing 
when compared with his transformation of them into 
works of art. Let us, in illustration, glance at his 
method of creation, as successfully exerted in any one 
of his great dramas, say Hamlet, or King Lear, or Mac- 
beth, or Othello. 

He takes a story or a history, with which the people 
are familiar, the whole interest of which is narrative. 
He finds it a mere succession of incidents ; he leaves it 
a combination of events. He finds the persons named 
in it mere commonplace sketches of humanity ; he leaves 
them self-subsisting, individual characters, more real to 
the mind than the men and women we daily meet. 

Now the first fact that strikes us when we compare 
the original story with Shakespeare's magical transform- 
ation of it is, that everything is raised from the actual 
world into a Shakespearian world. He alters, enlarges, 
expands, enriches, enlivens, informs, recreates every- 
thing, lifting sentiment, passion, humor, thought, action, 
to the level of his own nature. Through incidents and 
through characters is shot Shakespeare's soul, — a soul 
that yields itself to every mould of being, from the 
clown to the monarch, endows every class of character 
it animates with the Shakespearian felicity and certainty 
of speech, and, being in all as well as in each, so con- 



42 SHAKESPEAEE. 

nects and relates the society he has called into lif\ that 
they unite to form a whole, while existing with perfect 
distinctness as parts. The characters are not developed 
by isolation, but by sympathy or collision, and the closer 
they come together the less they run together. They 
are independent of each other, and yet necessitate each 
other. None of them could appear in any other play 
without exciting disorder ; yet in this play their discord 
conduces to the general harmony. And so tough is the 
hold on existence of these beings that, though thousands 
of millions of men and women have been born, have 
died, and have been forgotten since they were created, 
and though the actual world has strangely changed, 
these men and women of Shakespeare's are still alive, 
and Shakespeare's world still remains untouched by 
time. 

This drama, thus made self-existent in the free heaven 
of art, implies, in its conception and execution, processes 
analogous to those which are followed by Nature her- 
self in the production of her works ; and modern critics 
have not hesitated to award to Shakespeare the distinc- 
tion of being an organizer after her pattern. The 
drama which we have been describing is, like her works, 
not simple, but complex. It has unity, it has the widest 
variety, it has unity in variety. The most diverse and 
seemingly heterogeneous materials all aid to form a 



SHAKESPEARE. 43 

whole, " vital in every part " ; and the organization is 
strictly an addition to the world, with nothing in litera- 
ture and nothing in nature which exactly matches it. 
And it is alive, and refuses to die. Nature herself is 
compelled to adopt it into her race, 

" And give to it an equal date 
With Andes and witli Ararat." 

You can gaze at it as you can gaze at a natural land- 
scape, where hills, rocks, woods, stubble, grass, clouds, 
sky, atmosphere, each separate, each related, combine to 
form one impressive effect of beauty and power. 

Perhaps, however, it would be more proper to call 
this Shakespearian drama an approximation to an or- 
ganic product, rather than a realization of one. The 
processes of nature are followed, but the perfection of 
nature is the ideal it aims at rather than reaches. Still, 
if we allow for human defects and imperfections, and 
take into view the fact that Shakespeare had to submit 
to conditions imposed by his audience as well as condi- 
tions imposed by his genius, his work measurably fulfils 
the requirements of Kant's concise definition of an or- 
ganic creation, namely, "that thing in which all the 
parts are mutually ends and means." 

Admitting, then, that the drama we are considering 
has organic form, and not merely mechanical regularity, 
the question arises, What is the inner law, the central 



44 SHAKESPEAKE. 

idea, the principle of life, by whieh, and in obedience to 
which, it was organized ? Perhaps the new school of 
philosophic critics have done almost as much injury to 
Shakespeare's fame, in their attempt to answer this 
question, as they have done good in rescuing his dramas 
from the old school of sciolists and commentators, who 
were pecking at him with their formal rules of taste. 
The philosophic critics very properly insisted that he 
should be judged by principles deduced from his own 
method, and not by rules g^ieralized from the method 
of the Greek dramatists ; that the laws by which he 
should be tried were the laws which he acknowledged 
and obeyed, the laws of his own creative imagination ; 
and that the very originality of his dramas freed them 
from tests whi<5li are applicable only to the products 
of imitation. They thus raised Shakespeare from a 
bueaker of the laws into a lawgiver ; and the brilliant 
vagabond, whom eyery catchpole of criticism thouglit he 
could hustle about and reprimand, wa^ all at once lifted 
into a dictator of law to the bench. 

Having relieved Shakespeare from these pc^icemen 
of lett-ers, and substituted some reach of human vision 
for their rat'« eyes, the new school of philosophic critics 
proceeded to state what were the ideas which formed 
the gr>ound-plans and organizing principles of his works ; 
but in doing this, thay brought Shakespeare down to 



SHAKESPEAEE. 46 

their own level, and made him their spokesman. Intel- 
lectual egotism supplanted intellectual interpretation. 
Read Schlegel, Ulrici, even Gervinus, and you are de- 
lighted as long as they confine themselves to the busi- 
ness of exposing the folly of the critics they supplanted ; 
but when they come to the real problem, and attempt to 
state the meaning and purpose of Shakespeare in any 
given play, you are apt to be as much surprised as was 
that philanthropist, who was confidentially informed that 
the ultimate object Napoleon had in view in his nu- 
merous wars was the establishment of Sunday schools. 
They find in Shakespeare's plays certain ethical, politi- 
cal, or social generalities, which, it seems, they were 
written to illustrate, or rather from which the plays 
grow, as from so many roots. But causes are to be 
measured by effects ; the effects here are marvellous 
structures of genius ; and these do not shoot up from 
the withered roots of barren truisms. A whole must be 
greater than any of its parts; and yet the philosophic 
idea of a Shakespearian drama, as eliminated by the 
German professors, is less than the least of its parts. 
A single magical word in Shakespeare is often greater, 
and has more reach of application, than the professorial 
bit of wisdom which they present as the grand total of 
the play, and which is often too obvious in itself to make 
a resort to Shakespeare necessary for a perception of 



46 SHAKESPEARE. 

its truth. Their " ground ideas " of the dramas are not 
worth any minor Shakespearian ideas they are assumed 
to include. 

Indeed, before we claim to understand a Shake- 
spearian whole, ws must first see if we are competent 
to take in one of its parts. It is evident that the most 
important parts are the characters, and in respect to 
these, and to Shakespeare's method of characterization, 
there is much misconception. What are these charac- 
ters ? Are they copies of men and women, as we see 
them in the world, — slightly idealized portraits of per- 
sons, witty, passionate, thoughtful, or criminal? Are 
they such people as Shakespeare might have seen in the 
streets of London in the time of Elizabeth? No, for 
they are plainly Shakespearian, and not merely Eliza- 
bethan. Even the court-fools are endowed with the 
Shakespearian quality, are perfect of their kind, and 
are such court-fools as Shakespeare might have con- 
ceived himself to be one of, if he had, in Mr. Weller's 
phrase, " been born in that station of life." 

Yet these characters are certainly not individualized 
qualities and passions, for they are eminently natural. 
If their naturalness does not come from their being por- 
traits, shghtly varied and heightened, of individuals, in 
what does their naturalness consist ? 

In answer to this question, it is first to be said, that 



SHAKESPEARE. 47 

these characters prove that Shakespeare had a concep- 
tion of human nature, abstracted from all individuals. 
He not only looked at individuals, and into individuals, 
but through individuals to their common basis in hu- 
manity. But he did not rest here. This imaginative 
analysis, this vital generalization, this glance into the 
sources of things, evinces, of course, his possession of 
the profoundest philososophical genius as the foundation 
of his dramatic genius; but it is not the genius itself, 
for he also surveyed human nature in action, human na- 
ture as modified by human life, by manners, customs, 
institutions, and beliefs, and by that primitive person- 
ality which separates men, as humanity unites them. 

These characters, then, are individual natures rooted 
in human nature. The question then arises, Is their 
individuality particular or representative ? The least 
observation shows, we think, that they stand for more 
than individuals. We are continually saying that this 
or that person of our acquaintance resembles one of 
Shakespeare's characters ; we may even learn much 
about him by studying the character he resembles ; but 
we never thoroughly identify him with the character; 
for the character is more powerful, more perfectly de- 
veloped, acts out the law of his being with more free- 
dom, than the actual person with whom he is compared. 

Further than this, — if we are accustomed to classify 



48 SHAKESPEARE 

the persons we know, so as to include many individuals 
under one type, we shall find that we can include scores 
of our acquaintances in one of Shakespeare's characters, 
and then not exhaust its full application. It is not, 
therefore, his mere variety of characterization, but some- 
thing peculiar in each of the varieties, which makes him 
pre-eminently the poet of human nature. Why, for 
example, is not Charles Dickens as great a novelist as 
Shakespeare is a dramatist ? Dickens has delineated 
as wide a variety of persons as Shakespeare, if by vari- 
ety we mean the absence of repetition. There is no 
reason but the shortness of life why he should not peo- 
ple literature with new individuals, until his characters 
are numbered by the thousand, all in a certain sense 
original, all discriminated from each other, but few or 
none representative. The single character of Hamlet 
represents more individuals than do all the individuals 
Dickens has delineated. 

Again, Jane Austen is placed by Macaulay next to 
Shakespeare for the fehcity, certainty, and nicety of her 
portraitures of character. The most evanescent lines 
of distinction between persons who appear alike she seizes 
with wonderful tact, and indicates these differences with- 
out the least resort to caricature. If the best character- 
ization means simply the best portrait-painting, there is 
no reason why Elizabeth, in " Pride and Prejudice," 



SHAKESPEARE, 49 

Fhould not be placed side by side with Juliet and Cor- 
delia. 

But everybody feels that neither Dickens, wiMi his 
range of observation, nor Jane Austen, with her sub- 
tilty of observation, makes any approach to Shake- 
speare. What is the reason ? 

The reason is, that Shakespeare does not paint indi- 
viduals, but individualizes classes. In his great nature, 
the processes of reason and imagination, of philosophic 
insight and poetic insight, worked harmoniously together. 
His observation of persons only supplied him with hints 
for his creations. He did not take up at haphazard this 
man and that woman, and, because of their oddity or 
beauty, reproduce them in his story ; but he distm- 
guished in each actual person the signs of a class na^- 
ture, midway between his general nature and his indi- 
vidual peculiarities. He classified men as the naturalist 
classifies the Animal Kingdom. Agassiz is not confused 
by the perplexing spectacle of the myriads of animals 
which form the materials of his science ; for the moment 
his eye lights upon them, they fall into certain great 
natural divisions, distinguished by recognized marks 
of structure. Under each of a few grand divisions he 
includes innumerable individuals. Now the difference 
between Agassiz and a naere observer and deacriber of 
animals is the difference between Shakespeare and 

3 D 



50 SHAKESPEARE. 

Dickens, only that Shakespeare works on phenomena 
more complicated, and presenting more obstacles to 
classification, than Agassiz deals with. 

In his deep, wide, and searching observation of man- 
kind, Shakespeare detects bodies of men who agree in 
the general tendencies of their characters, who strive 
after a common ideal of good or evil, and who all fail to 
reach it. Through these indications and hints he seizes, 
by his philosophical genius, the law of the class ; by 
his dramatic genius, he gathers up in one conception the 
whole multitude of individuals comprehended in the 
law, and embodies it in a character ; and by his poet- 
ical genius he lifts this character into an ideal region of 
life, where all hindrances to the free and full develop- 
ment of its nature are removed. The character seems 
all the more natural because it is -perfect of its kind, 
whereas the actual persons included in the conception 
are imperfect of their kind. Thus there are many men 
of the type of Falstaff, but Shakespeare's Falstaff is not 
an actual Falstaff. Falstaff is the ideal head of the fam- 
ily, the possibility which they dimly strive to realize, the 
person they would be if they could. Again, there are 
many lagoish men, but only one lago, the ideal type of 
them all ; and by studying him we learn what they 
would all become if circumstances were propitious, and 
their loose malignant tendencies were firmly knit to- 



SHAKESPEARE. 51 

gether in positive will and diabolically alert intelligence. 
And it is the same with the rest of Shakespeare's great 
creations. The immense domain of human nature they 
cover is due to the fact, not merely that they are not 
repetitions of individuals, but that they are not repeti- 
tions of the same types or classes of individuals. 
The moment we analyze them, the moment we break 
them up into their constituent elements, we are amazed 
at the wealth of wisdom and knowledge which formed 
the materials of each individual embodiment, and the 
inexhaustible interest and fulness of meaning and appli- 
cation revealed in the analytic scrutiny of each. Com- 
pare, for example, Shakespeare's Timon of Athens — 
by no means one of Shakespeare's mightiest efforts of 
characterization — with Lord Byron, both as man and 
poet, and we shall find that Timon is the highest logical 
result of the Byronic tendency, and that in him, rather 
than in Byron, the essential misanthrope is impersonated. 
The number of poems which Byron wrote does not af- 
fect the matter at all, because the poems are all expan- 
sions and variations of one view of life, from which 
Byron could not escape. Shakespeare, had he pleased, 
might have filled volumes with Timon's poetic misan- 
thropy ; but, being a condenser, he was contented with 
concentrating the idea of the whole class in one grand 
character, and of putting into his mouth the truest, most 



52 SHAKESPEARE. 

splendid, most terrible things which have ever been 
uttered from the misanthropic point of view ; and then, 
victoriously freeing himself from the dreadful mood of 
mind he had imaginatively realized, he passed on to oc- 
cupy other and different natures. Shakespeare is su- 
perior to Byron on Byron's own ground, because Shake- 
speare grasped misanthropy from its first faint begin- 
nings in the soul to its firual result on character, — 
clutched its inmost essence, — discerned it as one out 
of a hundred subjective conditions of mind, — tried it 
thoroughly, and found it was too weak and narrow to hold 
him. Byron was in it, could not escape from it, and 
never, therefore, thoroughly mastered the philosophy of 
it. Here, then, in one corner of Shakespeare's mind, 
we find more than ample space for so great a poet as 
Byron to house himself 

But Shakespeare not only in one conception thus in- 
dividualizes a whole class of men, but he communicates 
to each character, be it little or colossal, good or evil, 
that peculiar Shakespearian quality which distinguishes 
it as his creation. This he does by being and living for 
the time the person he conceives. What Macaulay says 
of Bacon is more applicable to Shakespeare, namely, 
that his mind resembles the tent which the fairy gave to 
Prince Ahmed. " Fold it, and it seemed a toy fgr th-e 
hand of a lady. Spread it, and the armies of powerful 



SHAKESPEARE. 53 

sultans might repose beneath its shade." Shakespeare 
could run his sentiment, passion, reason, imagination, 
into any mould of personality he was capable of shaping, 
and think and speak from that. The result is that every 
character is a denizen of the Shakespearian World ; 
every character, from Master Slender to Ariel, is in 
some sense a poet, that is, is gifted with imagination to 
express his whole nature, and make himself inwardly 
known ; yet we feel throughout that the " thousand- 
souled" Shakespeare is still but one soul, capable of 
shifting into a thousand forms, but leaving its peculiar 
birth-mark on every individual it informs. 

Now it is difficult, perhaps impossible, for a critic to 
reproduce synthetically in his own consciousness, or 
thoroughly to analyze into all its elements, any single 
prominent character that Shakespeare has drawn. His 
characters, however, are not represented apart from 
each other, but as acting on each other ; and, great 
as they separately are as conceptions, they are but in- 
tegral portions of a still mightier conception, which in- 
cludes the whole drama in which they appear. The 
value of what we call the inxjidents of such a drama con- 
sists in their being such incidents as would most nat- 
urally spring from the mutual action of such persons, or 
as would best develop their natures. The plot is of 
small account as disconnected from the characters, but 



54 SHAKESPEAEE. 

of great moment as vitally inwrought with them, and 
giving coherence to the living organism which results 
from the combination. It is for this reason that we pay 
little heed to improbable incidents in the story, provided 
the incidents serve to bring out the persons. It is very 
improbable that a bond should have been given payable 
in a pound of flesh, and still more so that any court in 
Christendom could have recognized its validity ; but 
who thinks of this in the Shakespearian society of "The 
Merchant of Venice " ? 

Now it is doubtless true that a drama of Shakespeare 
thus organized, with characters comprehending an im- 
mense range of human character, and yielding to analy- 
sis laws of human nature which radiate light into whole 
departments of human life, produces on our minds, as 
we read, the effect of unity in variety. We perceive it 
as a whole, and think therefore we perceive the whole 
of it. But is it true that we really receive the colossal 
conception of Shakespeare himself ? Shakespeare, it is 
plain, can only convey to us what we are capable of 
taking in ; the mind that perceives reduces greatness 
to its own mental stature ; and persons, according to 
their taste, culture, experience, height of intelligence^ 
capacity of approaching Shakespeare himself, obtaiq 
different impressions, varying in depth and breadth, of 
each of his great plays. Who, for instance, has stated 



SHAKESPEARE. B5 

die general conception of the play of " Hamlet " ? The 
idea of that drama, as given by different critics, is only 
so much of the idea as could be got into the heads of 
the critics. Their interpretation at best belongs to the 
class of Memoires pour servir ; — the rounded whole is 
described by minds that are angular ; and Shakespeare's 
conception is measuring them, while they are felicitating 
themselves that they are measuring it. 

Even Goethe, the most comprehensive intelligence 
since Shakespeare, failed to "pluck out the heart" of 
Hamlet's mystery. Indeed, it is beginning to be con- 
sidered, that his remarks on the character, thongh deli- 
cate and profound in themselves, do not touch the es- 
sential individuality of Hamlet ; that his ingenuity was 
exercised in the wrong direction ; and that, in his criti- 
cism, he resembled the sturdy and rapid walker, who 
checked his pace to ask a boy how far it was to Taun- 
ton. "If you go on in the way you 're now go- 
ing," was the reply, " it 's twenty-four thousand miles ; 
if you turn back, it 's only five." But though some 
critics since Goethe have not been so elaborately wrong 
as he, Hamlet is still outside of the largest thought in 
the right direction. A distinguished thinker has said 
that there are moods of the mind in which Hamlet ap- 
pears little, for what he suggests is infinitely more than 
what he is. This is true as to Shakespeare, but not true 



56 SHAKESPEARE. 

as to other minds ; for until we have grasped the con- 
ception that Shakespeare has embodied, we have no 
right to suppose ourselves capable of going beyond it 
into that vastness of contemplation of which, from 
Shakespeare's height of vision, the character was an in- 
adequate expression. Again, it is a common remark, 
that the school of philosophic critics, especially in their 
attempts to dive into the meaning of Hamlet, are con- 
tinually giving Shakespeare the credit of their own 
thoughts. Giving Shakespeare the credit I Well might 
he reply, if such were the case, " Beggar that I am, 
I am even poor in thanks ! " 

Shakespeare, then, as regards his most gigantic con- 
ceptions, has probably never been adequately conceived. 
He must be tried by his peers ; and where are his 
peers ? We know that he grows in mental stature as 
our minds enlarge, and as we increase in our knowledge 
of him ; but he has never been included by criticism as 
other poets have been included. The greatest and most 
interpretative minds which have made him their study, 
though they may have commenced with wielding the' 
rod, soon found themselves seduced into taking seats on 
the benches, anxious to learn instead of impatient to 
teach ; and have been compelled to admit that the poet 
who is the delight of the rudest urchin in the pit of the 
playhouse, is also the poet whose works defy the highest 
faculties of the philosopher thoroughly to comprehend. 



SHAKESPEAEE. 



II. 



XN the last chapter we spoke of Shakespeare's general 
comprehensiveness and creativeness, of his method 
of characterization, and of the identity of his genius with 
his individuality. We purpose now to treat of some 
particular topics included in the general theme ; and, as 
criticism on him is like coasting along a continent, we 
shall make little pretension to system in the order of 
taking them up. 

The first of these topics is the succession of Shake- 
speare's works, considered as steps in the growth and 
development of his powers, — a subject which has al- 
ready been ably handled by Mr. Verplanck. The facts, 
as far as they can be ascertained, are these. Shake- 
speare went to London about the year 1586, in his 
twenty-second year, and found some humble employ- 
ment in one of the theatrical companies. Three years 
afterwards, in 1589, he had risen to be one of the share- 
holders of the Blackfriars Theatre. In 1592 he had ac- 
quired sufficient reputation as a dramatist, or at least as 
a recaster of the plays of others, to excite the jealousy 

3* 



58 SHAKESPEAKE. 

of the leading playwrights, whose crude dramas he 
condescended to rewrite or retouch. That graceless 
vagabond, Robert Greene, addressing from his penitent 
death-bed his old friends Lodge, Peele, and Marlowe, 
and trying to dissuade them from " spending their 
wits " any longer in " making plays," spitefully asserts : 
" There is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers, 
that, with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, 
supposes he is as able to bombast out a blank verse as 
the best of you ; and, being an absolute Johannes Fac- 
totum, is, in his own conceit, the only Shake-scene in 
the country." Doubtless this charge of adopting and 
adapting the productions of others includes some dramas 
which have not been preserved, as the company to 
which Shakespeare was attached owned the manuscripts 
of a great number of plays which were never printed, 
and it was a custom, when a play had popular elements 
in it, for other dramatists to be employed in making 
such additions as would give continual novelty to the 
old favorite. But of the plays published in our editions 
of Shakespeare's writings, it is probable that the Com- 
edy of Errors, and the three parts of King Henry VI., 
are only partially his, and should be classed among 
his adaptations, and not among his early creations. 
The play of Pericles bears no marks of his mind, ex- 
cept in some scenes of transcendent power and beauty, 



SHAKESPEARE. ^ 59 

which start up from the rest of the work like towers 
of gold from a plain of sand ; but these scenes are in 
his latest manner. In regard to the tragedy of Titus 
Andronicus, we are so constituted as to resist all the 
external evidence by which such a shapeless mass of 
horrors and absurdities is fastened on Shakespeare. 
Mr. Verplanck thinks it one of Shakespeare's first at- 
tempts at dramatic composition ; but first attempts must 
reflect the mental condition of the author at the time 
they were made ; and we know the mental condition 
of Shakespeare in his early manhood by his poem of 
Venus and Adonis, which he expressly styles "the 
first heir of his invention." Now leaving out of view 
the fact that Titus Andronicus stamps the impression, 
not of youthful, but of matured depravity of taste, its 
execrable enormities of feeling and incident could not 
have proceeded from the sweet and comely nature in 
which the poem had its birth. The best criticism on 
Titus Andronicus was made by Robert Burns, when 
he was nine years old. His schoolmaster was reading 
the play aloud in his father's cottage, and when he came 
to the scene where Lavinia enters with her hands cut 
ofi" and her tongue cut out, little Robert fell a-crying, 
and threatened, in case the play was left in the cottage, 
to burn it. It is hard to believe that what Burns de- 
spised and detested at the age of nine could have been 



•60 SHAKESPEAKE. 

written by Shakespeare at the age of twenty-five. 
Taking, then, Venus and Adonis as the point of de- 
parture, we find Shakespeare at the age of twenty-two 
endowed with all the faculties, but relatively deficient in 
the passions, of the poet. The poem is a throng of 
thoughts, fancies, and imaginations, somewhat cramped 
in the utterance. Coleridge says that " in his poems 
the creative power and the intellectual energy wrestle 
as in a war embrace. Each in its excess of strength 
seems to threaten the extinction of the other. At 
length in the drama they were reconciled, and fought 
each with its shield before the breast of the other." 
Fine as this is, it would perhaps be more exact to say 
that in his earlier poems his intellect, acting in some 
degree apart from his sensibility, and playing with its 
own ingenuities of fancy and meditation, condensed its 
thoughts in crystals. Afterwards, when his whole na- 
ture became liquid, he gave us his thoughts in a state 
of fusion, and his intellect flowed in streams of fire. 

Take, for example, that passage in the poem where 
Venus represents the loveliness of Adonis as sending 
thrills of passion into the earth on which he treads, and 
as making the bashful moon hide herself from the sight 
of his bewildering beauty : — 

" But if thou fall, 0, then imagine this ! 

The earth, in love with thee, thy footing trips. 



SHAKESPEARE. 61 

And all is but to rob thee of a kiss. 

Rich preys make true men thieves ; so do thy lips 
Make modest Dian cloudy and forlorn, 
Lest she should steal a kiss and die forsworn. 

" Now of this dark night I perceive the reason: 
Cynthia for shame obscures her silver shrine, 
Till forging Nature be condemned of treason, 

For stealing moulds from heaven that were divine, 
"Wherein she framed thee, in high heaven's despite. 
To shame the sun by day and her by night." 

This is reflected and reflecting passion, or, at least, 
imagination awakening passion, rather than passion 
penetrating imagination. 

Now mark, by contrast, the gush of the heart into 
the brain, dissolving thought, imagination, and expres- 
sion, so that they run molten, in the delirious ecstasy 
of Pericles on recovering his long-lost child : — 

" Helicanus ! strike me, honour'd sir, 
Give me a gash, put me to present pain, 
Lest this great sea of joys, rushing upon me, 
O'erbear the shores of my mortality, 
And drown me with their sweetness." 

If, as is probable, Venus and Adonis was written 
as early as 1586, we may suppose that the plays which 
represent the immaturity of his genius, and which are 
strongly marked with the characteristics of that poem, 
namely. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the first draft 



62 SHAKESPEARE. 

of Love's Labor's Lost, and the original Romeo and 
Juliet, were produced before the year 1592. Following 
these came King Richard III., King Richard IL, A 
Midsummer Night's Dream, King John, The Merchant 
of Venice, and King Henry IV., all of which we know 
were written before 1598, when Shakespeare was in 
his thirty-fourth year. During the next eight years he 
produced King Henry V., The Merry Wives of Wind- 
sor, As You Like it, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Measure 
for Measure, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear. In 
this list are the four great tragedies in which his genius 
culminated. Then came Troilus and Cressida, Timon 
of Athens, Julius Cjjesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Cym- 
beline. King Henry VIIL, The Tempest, The Winter's 
Tale, and Coriolanus. If heed be paid to this order 
of the plays, it will be seen at once that a quotation 
from Shakespeare carries with it a very different degree 
of authority, according as it refers to the youth or the 
maturity of his mind. 

Indeed, when we reflect that between the production 
of The Two Gentlemen of Verona and King Lear 
there is only a space of fifteen years, we must admit 
that the history of the human intellect presents no other 
example of such marvellous progress ; and if we note 
the giant strides by which it was made, we shall find 
that they all imply a progressive widening and deepen- 



SHAKESPEARE. 63 

U.^ of soul, a positive growth of the nature of the man, 
until in Lear the power became supreme and became 
amazing. Mr. Yerplanck considers the period when he 
produced his four great tragedies to be the period of his 
intellectual grandeur, as distinguished from an earlier 
period which he thinks shows the perfection of his 
merely poetic and imaginative power ; but the fact 
would seem to be that his increasing greatness as a phi- 
losopher was fully matched by his increasing greatness 
as a poet, and that, in the devouring swiftness of his 
onward and upward movement, imagination kept abreast 
of reason. His imagination was never more vivid, all- 
informing, and creative, — never penetrated with more 
unerring certainty to the inmost spiritual essence of 
whatever it touched, — never forced words and rhythm 
into more supple instruments of thought and feeling, — 
than when it miracled into form the terror and pity and 
beauty of Lear. 

Indeed, the coequal growth of his reason and imagi- 
nation was owing to the wider scope and increased 
energy of the great moving forces of his being. It 
relates primarily to the heart rather than the head. 
It is the immense fiery force behind his mental powers, 
kindling them into white heat, and urging them to ef- 
forts almost preternatural, — it is this which impels the 
daring thought beyond the limits of positive knowledge. 



64 SHAKESPEARE. 

and prompts the starts of ecstasy in whose unexpected 
radiance nature and human life are transfigured, and for 
an instant shine with celestial light. In truth he is, 
relatively, more intellectual in his early than in his later 
plays, for in his later plays his intellect is thoroughly 
impassioned, and though it has really grown in strength 
and massiveness, it is so fused with imagination and 
emotion as to be less independently prominento 

The sources of individuality lie below the intellect; 
and as Shakespeare went deeper into the soul of man, he 
more and more represented the brain as the organ and 
instrument of the heart, as the channel through which 
sentiment, passion, and character found an intelligible 
outlet. His own mind was singularly objective ; that is, 
he saw things as they are in themselves. The minds of 
his prominent characters are all subjective, and see 
things as they are modified by the peculiarities of their 
individual moods and emotions. The very objectivity 
of his own mind enables him to assume the subjective 
conditions of less-emancipated natures. Macbeth peoples 
the innocent air with menacing shapes, projected from 
his own fiend-haunted imagination ; but the same air is 
sweet and wholesome to the poet who gave being to 
Macbeth. The meridian of Shakespeare's power was 
reached when he created Othello, Macbeth, and Lear, 
— complex personalities, representing the conflict and 



SHAKESPEAEE. 65 

complication of the mightiest passions in colossal forms 
of human character, and whose understandings and im- 
aginations, whose perceptions of nature and human life, 
and whose weightiest utterances of moral wisdom, are 
all thoroughly subjective and individualized. The 
greatness of these characters, as compared with his ear- 
lier creations, consists in the greater intensity and ampli- 
tude of their natures, and the wider variety of faculties 
and passions included in the strict unity of their natures. 
Richard III., for example, is one of his earlier charac- 
ters, and, though excellent of its kind, its excellence has 
been approached by other dramatists, as, for instance, 
Massinger, in Sir Giles Overreach. But no other 
dramatist has been able to grasp and represent a char- 
acter similar in kind to Macbeth, and the reason is that 
Richard is comparatively a simple conception, while 
Macbeth is a complex one. There is unity and versa- 
tility in Richard ; there is unity and variety in Macbeth. 
Richard is capable of being developed with almost logi- 
cal accuracy ; for, though there is versatility in the play 
of his intellect, there is little variety in the motives 
w^hich direct his intellect. His wickedness is not ex- 
hibited in the making. He is so completely and glee- 
fully a villain from the first, that he is not restrained 
from convenient crime by any scruples or relentings. 
The vigor of his will is due to his poverty of feeling and 



6Q SHAKESPEARE. 

conscience. He is a brilliant and efficient criminal be- 
cause he is shorn of the noblest attributes of man. Put, 
if you could, Macbeth's heart and imagination into him, 
and his will would be smitten with impotence, and 
his wit be turned to wailing. The intellect of Macbeth 
is richer and grander than Richard's, yet Kichard is 
relatively a more intellectual character ; for the intellect 
of Macbeth is rooted in his moral nature, and is second- 
ary in our thoughts to the contending motives and 
emotions it obeys and reveals. In crime, as in virtue, 
what a man overcomes should enter into our estimate 
of the power exhibited in what he does. 

The question now comes up, — and we suppose it 
must be met, though we should like to evade it, — How, 
amid the individualities that Shakespeare has created, 
are we to detect the individuality of Shakespeare him- 
self ? In answer it may be said, that, if we survey his 
dramas in the mass, we find three degrees of unity ; — 
first, the unity of the individual characters ; second, the 
unity of the separate plays in which they appear ; and 
third, the unity of Shakespeare's own nature, — a na- 
ture which, as it developed, deepened, expanded, and 
increased in might, but did not essentially change, and 
which is felt as a potent presence throughout his works, 
binding them together as the product of one mind. He 
did not literally go out of himself to inform other na- 



SHAKESPEAEE. 67 

tures, but he included these natures in himself; and, 
though he does not infuse his individuality into his 
characters, he does infuse it into the general conceptions 
which the characters illustrate. His opinions, purposes, 
theory of life, are to be gathered, not from what his 
characters say and do, but from the results of what they 
say and do ; and in each play he so combines and dis- 
poses the events and persons that the cumulative im- 
pression expresses his own judgment, indicates his own 
design, and conveys his own feeling. His individu- 
ality is so vast, so purified from eccentricity, and we 
grasp it so imperfectly, that we are apt to deny it alto- 
gether, and conceive his mind as impersonal. In view 
of the multiplicity of his creations, and the range of 
thought, emotion, and character they include, it is a com- 
mon hyperbole of criticism to designate him as universal. 
But, in truth, his mind was restricted, in its creative ac- 
tion, like other minds, within the limits of its personal 
sympathies, though these sympathies in him were 
keener, quicker, and more general than in other men of 
genius. He was a great-hearted, broad-brained person, 
but still a person, and not what Coleridge calls him, an 
" omnipresent creativeness." Whatever he could sym- 
pathize with he could embody and vitally represent ; 
but his sympathies, though wide, were far from being 
universal, and, when he was indifferent or hostile, the 



68 SHAKESPEARE. 

dramatist was partially suspended in the satirist and 
caricaturist, and oversiglit took tlie place of insight. 
Indeed, his limitations are more easily indicated than 
his enlargements. We know what he has not done 
more surely than we know what he has done ; for if we 
attempt to follow his genius in any of the numerous 
lines of direction along which it sweeps with such vic- 
torious ease, we soon come to the end of our tether, and 
are confused with a throng of thoughts and imagina- 
tions, which, as Emerson exquisitely says, " sweetly 
torment us with invitations to their own inaccessible 
homes." But there were some directions which his 
genius did not take, — not so much from lack of mental 
power as from lack of disposition or from positive an- 
tipathy. Let us consider some of these. 

And iSrst, Shakespeare's religious instincts and senti- 
ments were comparatively weak, for they were not crea- 
tive. He has exercised his genius in the creation of no 
character in which religious sentiment or religious pas- 
sion is dominant. He could not, of course, — he, the 
poet of feudalism, — overlook religion as an element of 
the social organization of Europe, but he did not seize 
Christian ideas in their essence, or look at the human 
soul in its direct relations with God. And just think of 
the field of humanity closed to him ! For sixteen hun- 
dred years, remarkable men and women had appeared, 



SHAKESPEARE. 69 

representing all classes of religious character, from the 
ecstasy of the saint to the gloom of the fanatic ; yet his 
intellectual curiosity was not enough excited to explore 
and reproduce their experience. Do you say that the 
subject was foreign to the purpose of an Elizabethan 
playwright ? The answer is, that Dekkar and Massin- 
ger attempted it, for a popular audience, in " The Virgin 
Martyr " ; and though the tragedy of " The Virgin Mar- 
tyr " is a huddled mass of beauties and deformities, its 
materials of incident and characters, could Shakespeare 
have been attracted to them, might have been organized 
into as great a drama as Othello. Again, Marlowe, in 
his play of " Doctor Faustus," has imperfectly treated a 
subject which in Shakespeare's hands would have been 
made into a tragedy sublimer than Lear, could he have 
thrown himself into it with equal earnestness. Mar- 
lowe, from the fact tloat he was a brawling atheist, 
had evidently at some time directed his whole heart and 
imagination to the consideration of religious questions, 
and had resolutely faced facts from which Shakespeare 
turned away. 

Shakespeare, also, in common with th^ other dram- 
atists of the time., looked at the Puritans as objects of 
satire, laughing at them instead of gazing into them. 
They were doubtless grotesque enough in external ap- 
pearance ; but the poet of human nature should have 



70 SHAKESPEARE. 

penetrated through the appearance to the substance, and 
recognized in them, not merely the possibility of Crom- 
well, but of the ideal of character which Cromwell but 
imperfectly represented. You may say that Shake- 
speare's nature was too sunny and genial to admit the 
Puritan. It was not too sunny or genial to admit Rich- 
ards, and lagos, and Gonerils, and " secret, black, and 
midnight hags." 

It may be doubted also if Shakespeare's affinities ex- 
tended to those numerous classes of human character 
that stand for the reforming and philanthropic senti- 
ments of humanity. We doubt if he was hopeful for 
the race. He was too profoundly impressed with its 
disturbing passions to have faith in its continuous pro- 
gress. Though immensely greater than Bacon, it may 
be questioned if he could thoroughly have appreciated 
Bacon's intellectual character. He could have deline- 
ated him to perfection in everything but in that peculiar 
philanthropy of the mind, that spiritual benignity, that 
belief in man and confidence in his future, which both 
atone and account for so many of Bacon's moral defects. 
There is no character in his plays that covers the ele- 
ments of such a man as Hildebrand of Luther, or either 
of the two Williams of Orange, or Hampden, or How- 
ard, or Clarkson, or scores of other representative men 
whom history celebrates. Though the broadest individ- 



SHAKESPEARi 71 

ual nature which human nature has produced, human 
nature is immensely broader than he. 

It would be easy to quote passages from Shake- 
speare's works which would seem to indicate that hi? 
genius was not limited in any of the directions which 
have been pointed out ; but these passages are thoughts 
and observations, not men and women. Hamlet's 
soliloquy, and Portia's address to Shylock, might be ad- 
duced as proofs that he comprehended the religious ele- 
ment ; but then who would take Hamlet or Portia as 
representative of the religious character in any of its 
numerous historical forms ? There is a remark in one 
of his plays to this effect : — 

" It is an heretic that makes the fire, 
Not she which burns in 't." 

This might be taken as a beautiful expression of Chris- 
tian toleration, and is certainly admirable as a general 
thought ; but it indicates Shakespeare's indifference to 
religious passions in indicating his superiority to them. 
It would have been a much greater achievement of 
genius to have passed into the mind and heart of the 
conscientious burner of heretics, seized the essence of 
the bigot's character, and embodied in one great ideal 
individual a class of men whom we now both execrate 
and misconceive. If he coiJd follow the dramatic pro- 
cess of his genius for Sir Toby Welch, why could he not 
do it for St. Dominic ? 



72 SHAKESPEARE. 

Indeed, toleration, in the sense that Shakespeare has 
given to the word, is not expressed in maxims directed 
against intolerance, but in the exercise of charity towards 
intolerant men ; and it is thus necessary to indicate the 
limitations of his sympathy with his race, in order to ap- 
preciate its real quality and extent. His unapproached 
greatness consists, not in including human nature, but 
in taking the point of view of those large classes of hu- 
man nature he did include. His sympathetic insight 
was both serious and humorous ; and he thus equally 
escaped the intolerance of taste and the intolerance of 
intelligence. What we would call the worst criminals 
and the most stupid fools were, as mirrored in his mind, 
fairly dealt with ; every opportunity was afforded them 
to justify their right to exist ; their words, thoughts, and 
acts were viewed in relation to their circumstances and 
character, so that he made them inwardly known, as 
well as outwardly perceived. The wonder of all this 
would be increased, if we supposed, for the sake of illus- 
tration, that the persons and events of all Shakespeare's 
plays were historical, and that, instead of being repre- 
sented by Shakespeare, they were criticised by Macau- 
lay. The result would be that the impression received 
from the historian of every incident and every person 
would be different, and would be wrong. The external 
facts might not be altered ; but the falsehood would pro- 



SHAKESPEAKE. 73 

ceed from the incapacity or indisposition of the historian 
to pierce to the heart of the facts by sympathy and 
imagination. There would be abundant information, 
abundant eloquence, abundant invective against crime, 
abundant scorn of stupidity and folly, perhaps much 
sagacious reflection and judicial scrutiny of evidence ; 
but the inward and essential truth would be wanting. 
What external statement of the acts and probable mo- 
tives of Macbeth and Othello could convey the idea we 
have of them from being witnesses of the conflict of 
their thoughts and passions ? How wicked and shallow 
and feeble and foolish would Hamlet appear, if repre- 
sented, not in the light of Shake^eare's imagination, 
but in the hght of Macaulay's epigrams ! How the his- 
torian would display the dazzling fen^e of his rhetoric 
on the indecision of the prince, his brutality to Ophelia, 
his cowardice, his impotence between contending mo- 
tives, and the chaos of blunders and crimes in which he 
sinks from view ! The subject would be even a better 
one for him than that of James the Second ; yet the 
very supposition of such a mode of treatment makes us 
feel the pathos of the real Hamlet's injunction to the 
friend who strives to be his companion in death : — 

" Absent t-bee from felicity awhile, 
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, 
To tell my story. '^ 
4 



74 SHAKESPEARE. 

If the historian would thus deal with the heroes, 
such " small deer " as Bardolph and Master Slender 
would of course be puffed out of existence with one hiss 
of lordly contempt. Yet Macaulay has a more vivid 
historical imagination, more power of placing himself in 
the age about which he writes, than historians like 
Hume and Hallam, whose judgments of men are sum- 
maries of qualities, and imply no inwardness of vision, 
no discerning of spirits. In the whole class, the point 
of view is the historian's, and not the point of view of 
the persons the historian describes. The curse which 
clings to celebrity is, that it commonly enters history 
only to be puffed or lampooned. 

The truth is, that most men, the intelligent and the 
virtuous as well as the ignorant and the vicious, are in- 
tolerant of other individualities. They are uncharitable 
by defect of sympathy and defect of insight. Society, 
even the best, is apt to be made up of people who are 
engaged in the agreeable occupation of despising each 
other; for one association for mutual admiration there 
are twenty for mutual contempt ; yet while conversation 
is thus mostly made up of strictures on individuals, 
it rarely evinces any just perception of individualities. 
James is indignant or jocose at the absence of James 
in John, and John is horror-stricken at the impudence of 
James in refusing to be John. Each person feels himself 



SHAKESPEARE. 75 

to be misunderstood, though he never questions his power 
to understand his neighbor. Egotism, vanity, prejudice, 
pride of opinion, conceit of excellence, a mean delight in 
recognizing inferiority in others, a meaner delight in re- 
fusing to recognize the superiority of others, all the hon- 
est and all the base forms of self-assertion, cloud and 
distort the vision when one mind directs its glance at 
another. For one person who is mentally conscientious 
there are thousands who are morally honest. The re- 
sult is a vast massacre of character, which would move 
the observer's compassion were it not that the victims 
are also the culprits, and that pity at the spectacle of 
the arrow quivering in the sufferer's breast is checked 
by the sight of the bow bent in the sufferer's hands. 
This depreciation of others is the most approved method 
of exalting ourselves. It educates us in self-esteem, if 
not in knowledge. The savage conceives that the 
power of the enemy he kills is added to his own. 
Shakespeare more justly conceived that the power of 
the human being with whom he sympathized was added 
to his own. 

This toleration, without which an internal knowledge 
of other natures is impossible, Shakespeare possessed 
beyond any other man recorded in literature or history. 
It is a moral as well as mental trait, and belongs to the 
highest class of virtues. It is a virtue which, if gener- 



76 SHAKESPEARE. 

ally exercised, would remove mutual hostility by en- 
lightening mutual ignorance. And in Shakespeare we 
have, for once, a man great enough to be modest and 
charitable ; who has the giant's power, but, far from 
using it like a giant, trampling on weaker creatures, 
prefers to feel them in his arms rather than feel them 
under his feet ; and whose toleration of others is the 
exercise of humility, veracity, beneficence, and justice, 
as well as the exercise of reason, imagination, and hu- 
mor. "We shall never appreciate Shakespeare's genius 
until we recognize in him the exercise of the most 
difficult virtues, as well as the exercise of the most 
wide-reaching intelligence. 

It is, of course, not so wonderful that he should take 
the point of view of characters in themselves beautiful 
and noble, though even these might appear very differ- 
ent under the glance of a less soul-searching eye. For 
such aspects of life, however, all genius has a natural 
affinity. But the- marvel of his comprehensiveness is 
his mode of dealing with the vulgar, the vicious, and 
the low, — with persons who are commonly spurned as 
dolts and knaves. His serene benevolence did not 
pause at what are called " deserving objects of charity," 
but extended to the undeserving, who are, in truth, the 
proper objects of charity. If we compare him, in this 
respect, with poets like Dante and Milton, in whom 



SHAKESPEARE. 77 

elevation is the predominant characteristic, we shall find 
that they tolerate humanity only in its exceptional ex- 
amples of beauty and might. They are aristocrats of 
intellect and conscience, — the noblest aristocracy, but 
also the haughtiest and most exclusive. They can sym- 
pathize with great energies, whether celestial or diabolic, 
but their attitude towards the feeble and the low is apt 
to be that of indifference or contempt. Milton can do 
justice to the Devil, though not, like Shakespeare, to 
" poor devils." But it may be doubted if the wise and 
good have the right to cut the Providential bond which 
connects them with the foolish and the bad, and set up 
an aristocratic humanity of their own, ten times more 
supercilious than the aristocracy of blood. Divorce the 
loftiest qualities from humility and geniality, and they 
quickly contract a pharisaic taint ; and if there is any- 
thing which makes the wretched more wretched, it is 
the insolent condescension of patronizing benevolence, 
— if there is anything which makes the vicious more 
vicious, it is the " I-am-better-than-thou " expression on 
the face of conscious virtue. Now Shakespeare had 
none of this pride of superiority, either in its noble or 
ignoble form. Consider that, if his gigantic powers 
had been directed by antipathies instead of sympathies, 
he would have left few classes of human character un- 
touched by his terrible scorn. Even if his antipathies 



78 SHAKESPEAEE. 

had been those of taste and morals, he would have done 
so much to make men hate and misunderstand each 
other, — so much to destroy the very sentiment of hu- 
manity, — that he would have earned the distinction 
of being the greatest satirist and the worst man that 
ever lived. But instead, how humanely he clings to the 
most unpromising forms of human nature, insists on 
their right to speak for themselves as much as if they 
were passionate Romeos and high-aspiring Bucking- 
hams, and does for them what he might have desired 
should be done for himself had he been Dogberry, or 
Bottom, or Abhorson, or Bardolph, or any of the rest ! 
The low characters, the clowns and vagabonds, of Ben 
Jonson's plays, excite only contempt or disgust. Shake- 
speare takes the same materials as Ben, passes them 
through the medium of his imaginative humor, and 
changes them into subjects of the most soul-enriching 
mirth. Their actual prototypes would not be tolerated ; 
but when his genius shines on them, they " lie in light " 
before our humorous vision. It must be admitted that 
in his explorations of the lower levels of human nature 
he sometimes touches the mud deposits ; still, he never 
hisses or jeers at the poor relations through Adam he 
there discovers, but magnanimously gives them the wink 
of consanguinity. 

This is one extreme of his genius, — the poetic com- 



SHAKESPEARE. 79 

prehension and embodiment of the low. What was the 
other extreme ? How high did lie mount in the ideal 
region, and what class of his characters represents his 
loftiest flight ? It is commonly asserted that his super- 
natural beings, — his ghosts, spectres, witches, fairies, and 
the like, — exhibiting his command of the dark side and 
the bright' side, the terror and the grace, of the super- 
natural world, indicate his rarest quality ; for in these, 
it is said, he went out of human nature itself, and 
created beings that never existed. Wonderful as these 
are, we must recollect that in them he worked on a 
basis of popular superstitions, on a mythology as definite 
as that of Greece and Rome, and though he recreated 
instead of copying his materials, though he Shakespear- 
ianized them, he followed the same process of his 
genius in delineating Hecate and Titania as in deline- 
ating Dame Quickly and Anne Page. All his charac- 
ters, from the rogue Autolycus to the heavenly Cordelia, 
are in a certain sense ideal ; but the question now re- 
lates to the rarity of the elements, and the height of the 
mood, and not merely to the action of his mind ; and 
we think that the characters technically called super- 
natural which appear in his works are much nearer the 
earth than others which, though they lack the name, 
have more of the spiritual quality of the thing. The 
highest form of the supernatural is to be found in the 
purest, highest, most beautiful souls. 



80 SHAKESPEAEE. 

Did it never strike you, in reading The Tempest, that 
Ariel is not so supernatural as Miranda ? We may be 
sure that Ferdinand so thought, in that rapture of 
wonder when her soul first shone on him through her 
innocent eyes ; and afterwards, when he asks, 

" I do beseech you 
(Chiefly that I might set it in my prayers )- 
"What is your name ? " 

And doubtless there was a more marvellous melody in 
her voice than in the mysterious magical music 

" That crept by him upon the waters, 
Allayhig both their fury and his passion 
With its sweet air." 

Shakespeare, indeed, in his transcendently beautiful 
embodiments of feminine excellence, the most exquisite 
creations in literature, passed into a region of sentiment 
and thought, of ideals and of ideas, altogether higher 
and more supernatural than that region in which he 
shaped his delicate Ariels and his fairy Titanias. The 
question has been raised whether sex extends to soul. 
However this may be decided, here is a soul, with its 
records in literature, who is at once the manliest of men, 
and the most womanly of women ; who can not only 
recognize the feminine element in existing individuals, 
but discern the idea, the pattern, the radiant genius, o^ 



SHAKESPEARE 81 

womanhood itself, as it hovers, unseen by other eyes, 
over the living representatives of the sex. Literature 
boasts many eminent female poets and novelists ; but 
not one has ever approached Shakespeare in the purity, 
the sweetness, the refinement, the elevation, of his per- 
ceptions of feminine character, — much less approached 
him in the power of embodying these perceptions in per- 
sons. These characters are so thoroughly domesticated 
on the earth, that we are tempted to forget the heaven 
of invention from which he brought them. The most 
beautiful of spirits, they are the most tender of daugh- 
ters, lovers, and wives. They are " airy shapes," but 
they " syllable men's names." Rosalind, Juliet, Ophe- 
lia, Viola, Perdita, Miranda, Desdemona, Hermione, 
Portia, Isabella, Imogen, Cordelia, — if their names do 
not call up their natures, the most elaborate analysis 
of criticism will be of no avail. Do you say that these 
women are slightly idealized portraits of actual women ? 
Was Cordelia, for example, simply a good, affectionate 
daughter of a foolish old king ? To Shakespeare him- 
self she evidently " partook of divineness " ; and he hints 
of the still ecstasy of contemplation in which her nature 
first rose upon his imagination, when, speaking through 
the lips of a witness of her tears, he hallows them as 

they fall : — 

" She shook 

The holy water from her heavenly eyes." 

4 * I" 



82 SHAKESPEARE. 

And these Shakespearian women, though all radia- 
tions from one great ideal of womanhood, are at the same 
time intensely individualized. Each has a separate soul, 
and the processes of intellect as well as emotion are 
different in each. Each, for example, is endowed with 
the faculty, and is steeped in the atmosphere, of imagi- 
nation ; but who could mistake the imagination of 
Ophelia for the imagination of Imogen ? — the loitering, 
lingering movement of the one, softly consecrating 
whatever it touches, for the irradiating, smiting efficiency, 
the flash and the bolt, of the other ? Imogen is perhaps 
the most completely expressed of Shakespeare's women ; 
for^ in her, every faculty and affection is fused with 
imagination, and the most exquisite tenderness is com- 
bined with vigor and velocity of nature. Her mind 
darts in an instant to the ultimate of everything. After 
she has parted with her husband, she does not merely 
say that she will pray for him. Her affection is winged, 
and in a moment she is enskied. She does not look up, 
she goes up : she would have charged him, she says, 

" At the sixth, hour of morn, at noon, at midnight; 
. T' encounter me with orisons, for then 
/ am in heaven for him.'''' 

When she hears of her husband's inconstancy, the possi- 
ble object of his sensual whim is at once consumed in 
the fire that leaps from her impassioned lips : — 



SHAKESPEAEE. 83 

" Some jay of Italy, 
Whose mother is her painting, hath betrayed him." 

Mr. Collier, ludicrously misconceiving the instinctive ac- 
tion of Imogen's mind, thinks the true reading is, " who 
smothers her with painting." Now Imogen's wrath 
first reduces the light woman to the most contemptible 
of birds and the most infamous of symbols, the jay, and 
then, not willing to leave her any substance at all, anni- 
hilates her very being with the swift thought that the 
paint on her cheeks is her mother, — that she is nothing 
but the mere creation of painting, a phantom born of a 
color, without real body or soul. It would be easy to show 
that the mental processes of all Shakespeare's women 
are as individual as their dispositions. 

And now think of the amplitude of this man's soul ! 
Within the immense space which stretches between Dog- 
berry or Launcelot Gobbo and Imogen or Cordelia, 
lies the Shakespearian world. No other man ever ex- 
hibited such philosophic comprehensiveness ; but philo- 
sophic comprehensiveness is often displayed apart from 
creative comprehensiveness, and along the whole vast 
line of facts, laws, analogies, and relations over which 
Shakespeare's intellect extended, his perceptions were 
vital, his insight was creative, his thoughts flowed in 
forms. And now, was he proud of his transcendent supe- 
riorities ? Did he think that he had exhausted all that 



84 SHAKESPEAKE. 

can appear before the sight of the eye and the sight of 
the soul ? No. The immeasurable opulence of the undis- 
covered and undiscerned regions of existence was never 
felt with more reverent humility than by this discoverer, 
who had seen in rapturous visions so many new worlds 
open on his view. In the play which perhaps best ex- 
hibits the ecstatic action of his mind, and which is alive 
in every part with that fiery sense of unlimited power 
which the mood of ecstasy gives, — in the play of An- 
tony and Cleopatra, — he has put into the mouth of the 
Soothsayer what seems to have been his own modest 
judgment of the extent of his glance into the uni=> 
verse of matter and mind : — 

"In nature's infinite book of secrecy 
A little I can read ! " 



be:n" jonson". 

A UTHORS are apt to be popularly considered as 
•^-*- physically a feeble folk, — as timid, nervous, dys- 
peptic rhymers or prosers, unfitted to grapple with the 
rough realities of life. We shall endeavor here to pre- 
sent the image of one calculated to reverse this impres- 
sion, — the image of a stalwart man of letters, who 
lived two centuries and a half ago, in the greatest age 
of English literature, who undeniably had brawny 
fists as well as forgetive faculties, who could handle 
a club as readily as a pen, hit his mark with a 
bullet as surely as with a word, and — a sort of cross be- 
tween the bully and the bard — could shoulder his way 
through a crowd of prize-fighters to take his seat among 
the tuneful company of immortal poets. This man, 
Ben Jonson, commonly stands next to Shakespeare in a 
consideration of the dramatic literature of the age of 
Elizabeth ; and certainly, if the " thousand-souled " 
Shakespeare may be said to represent mankind, Ben as 
unmistakably stands for English-kind. He is " Saxon " 
England in epitome, — John Bull passing from a name 
into a man, — a proud, strong, tough, solid, domineer- 



86 BEN JONSON. 

ing individual, whose intellect and personality cannot be 
severed, even in thought, from his body and personal 
appearance. Ben's mind, indeed, was rooted in Ben's 
character ; and his character took symbolic form in his 
physical frame. He seemed built up, mentally as well 
as bodily, out of beef and sack, mutton and Canary ; or, 
to say the least, was a joint product of the English mind 
and the English larder, of the fat as well as the thought of 
the land, of the soil as well as the soul of England. The 
moment we attempt to estimate his eminence as a dram- 
atist, he disturbs the equanimity of our judgment by tum- 
bling head-foremost into the imagination as a big, bluff, 
burly, and quarrelsome man, with " a mountain belly and 
a rocky face." He is a very pleasant boon companion 
as long as we make our idea of his importance agree 
with his own ; but the instant we attempt to dissect his 
intellectual pretensions, the living animal becomes a 
dangerous subject, — his countenance flames, his great 
hands double up, his thick lips begin to twitch with im- 
pending invective, and, while the critic's impression of 
him is thus all the more vivid, he is checked in its ex- 
pression by a very natural fear of the consequences. 
There is no safety but in taking this rowdy leviathan of 
letters at his own valuation ; and the relation of critics 
towards him is as perilous as that of the jurymen to- 
wards the Irish advocate, who had an unpleasant habit 



BEN JONSON. 87 

of sending them the challenge of the duellist whenever 
they brought in a verdict against any of his clients. 
There is, in fact, such a vast animal force in old Ben's 
self-assertion, that he bullies posterity as he bullied his 
contemporaries ; and, while we admit his claim to rank 
next to Shakespeare among the dramatists of his age, 
we beg our readers to understand that we do it under 
intimidation. 

The qualities of this bold, racy, and brawny egotist 
can be best conveyed in a biographical form. He was 
born in 1574, the grandson of a gentleman who, for his 
religion, lost his estate, and for a time his liberty, in 
Queen Mary's reign, and the son of a clergyman in hum- 
ble circumstances, who died about a month before his 
" rare " offspring was born. His mother, shortly after 
the death of her husband, married a master-bricklayer. 
Ben, who as a boy doubtless exhibited brightness of in- 
tellect and audacity of spirit, seems to have attracted the 
attention of Camden, who placed him in Westminster 
School, of which he was master. Ben there displayed 
so warm a love of learning, and so much capacity in 
rapidly acquiring it, that at the age of sixteen he is 
said to have been removed to the University of Cam- 
bridge, though he stated to Drummond, long after- 
wards, that he was "master of arts in both the Uni- 
versities, by their favor, not his studie." His ambition 



88 BEN JONSON. 

at this time, if we may believe some of his biographers, 
was to be a clergyman ; and had it been gratified, he 
would probably have blustered his way to a bishopric, 
and proved himself one of the most arrogant, learned, 
and pugnacious disputants of the English Church Mili- 
tant, — perhaps have furnished the type of that pecu- 
liar religionist, compounded of bully, pedant, and bigot, 
whom Warburton was afterwards, from the lack of 
models, compelled to originate. But after residing a few 
months at the University, Ben, deserted by his friends 
and destitute of money, found it impossible to carry out 
his design ; and he returned disappointed to his mother's 
house. As she could not support him in idleness, the 
stout-hearted student adopted the most obvious means 
of earning his daily bread, and for a short time followed 
the occupation of his father-in-law, going to the work of 
bricklaying, according to the tradition, with a trowel in 
one hand, but with a Horace in the other. His enemies 
among the dramatists did not forget this when he be- 
came famous, but meanly sneered at him as "the 
lime-and-mortar poet." "When we reflect that in the 
aristocratic age of good Queen Bess, play-writing, even 
the writing of Hamlets and Alchy mists, was, if we may 
trust Dr. Farmer, hardly considered " a creditable em- 
ploy," we may form some judgment of the position of 
the working classes, when a mechanic was thus deemed 



BEN JONSON. 89 

to have no rights which a playwright " was bound to 
respect." 

We have no means of deciding whether or not Ben 
was foolish enough to look upon his trade as degrading ; 
that it was distasteful we know from the fact that he 
soon exchanged the trowel for the sword ; and we hear 
no more of his dealing with bricks, if we may except 
his questionable habit of sometimes carrying too many 
of them in his hat. At the age of eighteen he ran 
away to the Continent, and enlisted as a volunteer in 
the English army in Flanders, fully intending, doubt- 
less, as fate seemed against his being a Homer or an 
Aristotle, to try if fortune would not make him an 
Alexander or a Hannibal. As ill-luck would have it, 
however, his abundant vitality had little scope in mar- 
tial exercise. He does not appear to have been in any 
general engagement, though he signalized his personal 
prowess in a manner which he was determined should 
not be forgotten through any diffidence of his own. 
Boastful as he was brave, he was never weary of brag- 
ging how he had encountered one of the enemy, fought 
with him in presence of both armies, killed him, and tri- 
umphantly " taken opima spoUa from him." 

After serving one campaign, our Ajax-Thersites re- 
turned, at the age of nineteen, to England, bringing with 
him, according to Gifford, " the reputation of a brave 



90 BEN JONSON. 

man, a smattering of Dutch, and an empty purse." To 
these efficiencies and deficiencies he probably added 
the infirmity of drinking ; for, as " our army in 
Flanders " ever drank terribly as well as " swore 
terribly," it may be supposed that Ben there laid, 
deep and wide, the foundation of his bacchanalian 
habits. Arrived in London, and thrown on his own 
resources for support, he turned naturally to the stage, 
and became an actor in a minor playhouse, called 
the Green Curtain. Though he was through life 
a good reader, and though at this time he was not 
afflicted with the scurvy, which eventually so punched 
his face as to make one of his satirists compare it, with 
witty malice, to the cover of a warming-pan, he still 
never rose to any eminence as an actor. He had not 
been long at the Green Curtain when a quarrel with 
one of his fellow-performers led to a duel, in which Jon- 
son killed his antagonist, was arrested on a charge of 
murder, and, in his own phrase, was brought " almost at 
the gallowes," — an unpleasant proximity, which he 
hastened to increase by relieving the weariness of im- 
prisonment in discussions on religion with a Popish 
priest, also a prisoner, and by becoming a convert to 
Romanism. As the zealous professors of the old faith 
had passed, in Elizabeth's time, from persecutors into 
martyrs, Ben, the descendant of one of Queen Mary's 



BEN JONSON. 91 

victims, evinced more than his usual worldly prudence 
in seizing this occasion to join their company, as he 
could reasonably hope that, if he escaped hanging on 
the charge of homicide, he still might contrive to be 
beheaded and disembowelled on a charge of treason. 
In regard, however, to the original cause of his impris- 
onment, it would seem that, on investigation, it was 
found the duel had been forced upon him, that his an- 
tagonist had taken the precaution of bringing into the 
field a sword ten inches longer than his own, and thus, 
far from expecting to be the victim of murder, had not 
unsagaciously counted on committing it. Jonson was 
released ; but, apparently vexed at this propitious turn 
of his fortunes, instead of casting about for some means 
of subsistence, he almost immediately married a woman 
as poor as himself, — a wife whom he afterwards curtly 
described as " a shrew, yet honest." A shrew, indeed ! 
As if Mrs. Jonson must not often have had just occasion 
to use her tongue tartly ! — as if her redoubtable Ben 
did not often need its acrid admonitions ! They seem 
to have lived together until 1613, when they separated. 
Absolute necessity drove Jonson again to the stage, 
probably both as actor and writer. He began his dra- 
matic career, as Shakespeare had begun his, by doing 
job-work for the managers, — that is, by altering, recast- 
ing, and making additions to, old plays. At last, in 



92 BEN JONSON. 

1596, in his twenty-second year, he placed himself at a 
bound among the famous dramatists of the time, by the 
production, at the Rose Theatre, of his comedy of Ev- 
ery Man in his Humor. Two years afterwards, having 
in the mean time been altered and improved, it was, 
through the influence of Shakespeare, accepted by the 
players of the Blackfriars Theatre, Shakespeare him- 
self acting the characterless part of the Elder Knowell. 
Among the writers of the Elizabethan age, — an age 
in which, for a wonder, there seemed to be a glut of 
genius, — Ben is prominent more for racy originality of 
personal character, weight of understanding, and quick- 
ness of fancy, than for creativeness of imagination. 
His first play. Every Man in his Humor, indicates, to a 
great extent, the quality and the kind of power with 
which he was endowed. His prominent characteristic 
was will, — will carried to self-will, and sometimes to 
self-exaggeration almost furious. His understanding 
was solid, strong, penetrating, even broad, and it was 
well furnished with matter derived both from experience 
and books ; but, dominated by a personality so fretful 
and fierce, it was impelled to look at men and things, 
not in their relations to each other, but in their relations 
to Ben. He had reached that ideal of stormy conceit 
in which, according to Emerson, the egotist declares, 
^ Difference from me is the measure of absurdity." 



BEN JONSON. 93 

Even the imaginary characters he delineated as a dram- 
atist were all bound, as by tough cords, to the will that 
gave them being, lacked that joyous freedom and care- 
less grace of movement which rightfully belonged to 
them as denizens of an ideal world, and had to obey 
their master Ben, as puppets obey the showman. His 
power of external observation was pitilessly keen and 
searching, and it was accompanied by a rich, though 
somewhat coarse and insolent vein of humor; but his 
egotism commonly directed his observation to what was 
below, rather than above himself, and gave to his humor 
a scornful, rather than a genial tone. He huffs even in 
his hilarity ; his fun is never infectious ; and his very 
laughter is an assertion of superior wisdom. He has 
none of that humanizing humor, which, in Shakespeare, 
makes us like the vagabonds we laugh at, and which 
insures for Dogberry and Nick Bottom, Autolychus and 
Falstaff, warmer friends among readers than many great 
historic dignities of the state and the camp can command. 
In regard to the materials of the dramatist, Jonson, 
in his vagrant career, had seen human nature under 
many aspects; but he had surveyed it neither with the 
eye of reason nor the eye of imagination. His mind 
fastened on the hard actualities of observation, without 
passing to what they implied or suggested. Deficient, 
thus, in philosophic insight and poetic insight, his shrewd. 



94 BEN JONSON. 

contemptuous glance rarely penetrated beneath the man- 
ners and eccentricities of men. His attention was 
arrested, not by character, but by prominent peculiarities 
of character, — peculiarities which almost transformed 
character into caricature. To use his own phrase, he 
delineated *' humors " rather than persons, that is, indi- 
viduals under the influence of some dominant aflPectation, 
or whim, or conceit, or passion, that drew into itself, 
colored, and mastered the whole nature, — " an acorn," 
as Sir Thomas Browne phrases it, "in their young 
brows, which grew to an oak in their old heads." He 
thus inverts the true process of characterization. In- 
stead of seeing the trait as an offshoot of the. individual, 
he individualizes the trait. Every man is in his humor, 
instead of every humor being in its man. In order that 
there should be no misconception of his purpose, he 
named his chief characters after their predominant 
qualities, as Morose, Surly, Sir Amorous La Fool, Sir 
Politic Would Be, Sir Epicure Mammon, and the like ; 
and, apprehensive even then that his whole precious 
meaning would not be taken in, he appended to his 
dramatis personcB further explanations of their respective 
natures. 

This distrust of the power of language to lodge a 
notion in another brain is especially English ; but Ben, 
of all writers, seems to have been most impressed with 



BEN JONSON. 95 

the necessity of pounding an idea into the perceptions 
of his countrymen. His mode resembles ^he attempt 
of that honest Briton who thus delivered his judgment 
on the French nation : " I hate a Frenchman, sir. 
Every Frenchman is either a puppy or a rascal, sir." 
And Ihen, fearful that he had not been sufficiently 
explicit, he added, " Do you take my idea ? " 

With all abatements, however, the comedy of Every 
Man in his Humor is a remarkable effort, considered as 
the production of a young man of twenty-two. The 
two most striking characters are Kitely and Captain 
Bobadil. Give Jonson, indeed, a peculiarity to start 
with, and he worked it out with logical exactness. So 
intense was his conception of it, that he clothed it in 
flesh and blood, gave it a substantial existence, and 
sometimes succeeded in forcing it into literature as a 
permanent character. 

Bobadil, especially, is one of Ben's masterpieces. 
He is the most colossal coward and braggart of the 
comic stage. He can sv»^ear by nothing less terrible 
than " by the body of Csesar," or " by the foot of Pha- 
raoh," when his oath is not something more terrific still, 
namely, " by my valor " ! Every school-boy knows the 
celebrated passage in which the boasting Captain offers to 
settle the affairs of Europe by associating with himself 
twenty other Bobadils, as "cunning i' the fence " as him- 



96 BEN JONSON. 

self, and challenging an army of forty thousand men, 
twenty at a time, and killing the whole in a certain 
number of days. Leaving out the cowardice, we may 
say there was something of Bobadil in Jonson him- 
self; and it may be shrewdly suspected that his con- 
ceit of destroying an army in this fashion came into his 
head in the exultation of feeling which followed his own 
successful exploit, in the presence of both armies, when 
he was a soldier in Flanders. Old John Dennis de- 
scribed genius " as a furious joy and pride of soul at the 
conception of an extraordinary hint." Ben had this 
" furious joy and pride," not only in the conception of 
extraordinary hints, but in the doing of extraordinary 
things. 

Jonson followed up his success by producing the 
plays of Every Man out of his Humor and Cynthia's 
Revels, — dramatic satires on the manners, folHes, affec- 
tations, and vices, of the city and the court. One good 
result of Jonson's egotism was, that it made him afraid 
of nothing. He openly appeared among the dramatists 
of his day as a reformer, and, poor as he was, refused 
10 pander to popular tastes, whether those tastes took 
the direction of ribaldry, or blasphemy, or bombast. He 
had courage, morality, earnestness ; but then his cour- 
age was so blustering,, his morality so irascible, and his 
devotion to his own ideas of art so exclusive, that he 



BEN JONSON. 97 

was constantly defying and insulting the persons he pro- 
posed to teach. Other dramatists said to the audience, 
" Please to applaud this " ; but Ben said, " Now, you 
fools, we shall see if you have sense enough to applaud 
this ! " The stage, to be sure, was to be exalted and 
improved, but it was to be done by his own works, and 
the glory of literature w^as to be associated with the 
glory of Master Benjamin. This conceit, by making 
him insensible to Shakespeare's influence, made him, 
next to Shakespeare, perhaps the most original dram- 
atist of the time. He differed from his brother dram- 
atists not in degree, but in kind. He felt it was not for 
him to imitate, but to produce models for imitation, — not 
for him to catch the spirit of the age, but to originate a 
better. In short, he felt and taught belief in Ben ; and, 
high as posterity rates the literature of the age of Eliza- 
beth, it would be supposed from his prologues and epi- 
logues that he conceived his fat body to have fallen on 
evil days. 

In every Man out of his Humor and Cynthia's Revels, 
he is in a raging passion throughout. His verse groans 
with the weight of his wrath. " My soul," he exclaims, 

" Was never ground into such oily colors 
To flatter vice and daub iniquity. 
But with an arm^d and resolved hand 
I '11 strip the ragged follies of the time 
Naked as at their birth, 



98 BEjn jonson. 

and with a -whip of steel 
Print wounding lashes on their iron ribs." 

But though he exhausts the whole rhetoric of railing, in- 
vective, contempt, and scorn, we yet find it difficult to feel 
any of the indignation he labors to excite. Admiration, 
however, cannot be refused to Jonson's prose style in 
these as in his other plays. It is terse, sharp, swift, 
biting, — every word a die that stamps a definite 
image. Occasionally the author's veins, to use his own 
apt expression, seem to " run quicksilver," and " every 
phrase comes forth steeped in the very brine of conceit, 
and sparkles like salt in fire." Yet, though we have 
scenes in which there is brightness in every sentence, 
the result of the whole is something like dulness, as 
the object of the whole is to exalt himself and de- 
press others. But in these plays, in strange contrast 
with their general character, we have a few specimens 
of that sweetness of sentiment, refinement of fancy, and 
indefinite beauty of imagination, which, occupying some 
secluded corner of his large brain, seemed to exist apart 
from his ordinary powers and passions. Among these, the 
most exquisite is this Hymn to Diana, which partakes of 
the serenity of the moonlight, whose goddess it invokes ; — 

" Queen and huntress chaste and fair, 
Now the sun is laid to sleep, 
Seated in thy silver chair, 



BEN JONSON. 99 

State in wonted manner keep. 
Hesperus entreats thy light, 
Goddess excellently bright ! 

" Earth, let not thy envious shade 
Dare itself to interpose ; 
Cynthia's shining orb was made 
Heaven to clear when day did close. 
Bless us, then, with wishdd sight, 
Goddess excellently bright. 

" Lay thy bow of pearl apart 

And thy crystal-gleaming quiver; 
Give unto the flying hart 
Space to breathe how short soever, — 
Thou that mak'st a day of night. 
Goddess excellently bright." 

If, as Jonson's adversaries maliciously asserted, " every 
line of his poetry cost him a cup of sack/' we must, even 
in our more temperate days, pardon him the eighteen 
cups which, in this melodious lyric, went into his mouth 
as sack, but, by some precious chemistry, came out 
through his pen as pearls. 

It was inevitable that the imperious attitude Jonson 
assumed, and the insolent pungency of his satire, should 
rouse the wrath of the classes he lampooned and the 
enmity of the poets he ridiculed and decried. Among 
those who conceived themselves assailed, or who felt 
insulted by his arrogant tone, were two dramatists. 



100 BEN JONSON. 

Thomas Dekkar and John Marston. They soon re' 
criminated ; and, as Ben was better fitted by nature to 
dispense than to endure scorn and derision, he, in 1601, 
produced The Poetaster, the object of which was to 
silence forever, not only Dekkar and Marston, but all 
other impudent doubters of his infallibility. The humor 
of the thing is, that, in this elaborate attempt to convict 
his adversaries of calumny in taxing him with self-love 
and arrogance, he ostentatiously exhibits the very quali- 
ties he disclaims. He keeps no terms with those who 
profess disbelief in Ben. They are " play-dressers and 
plagiaries," " fools or jerking pedants," " buffoon barking 
wits," tickling "base vulgar ears with beggarly and 
barren trash," while his are 

" The high raptures of a happy Muse, 
Borne on the wings of her immortal thought, 
That kicks at earth with a disdainful heel, 
And beats at heaven's gate with her bright hoofs." 

Dekkar retorted in a play called Satiromastrix ; or, the 
Untrussing of the Humorous Poet ; but, though the scur- 
rility is brilliantly bitter, it is less efficient and "hearted " 
than Jonson's. This literary controversy, conducted 
in acted plays, had to the public of that day a zest 
similar to that we should enjoy if the editors of two 
opposing political newspapers should meet in a hall filled 
with their subscribers, and fling their thundering edito- 



BEN JONSON. 101 

rials in person at each other's heads. The theatre-goers 
seem to have declared for Dekkar and Marston ; and 
Ben, disgusted with such a proof of their incapacity of 
right judgment, sulked and growled in his den, and for 
two years gave nothing to the stage. He kad^ however, 
found a patron, who enabled him to do this without under- 
going the famine of insufficient meat, and the still mora 
dreadful drought of insufficient drink ; for, in a gossip- 
ing diary of the period, covering these two years, we 
are informed, " B. J. now lives with one Tovvnsend, and 
scorns the world.^^ While, however, pleasantly engaged 
in this characteristic occupation, for which he had a nat- 
ural genius, he was meditating a play which he thought 
would demonstrate to all judging spirits his possession 
equally of the acquirements of the scholar and the tal- 
ents of the dramatist. In the conclusion of the Apolo- 
getic Dialogue which accompanies The Poetaster, he 
had hinted his purpose in these energetic lines : — 

" Once I '11 say, — 
To strike the ears of Time in these fresh strains, 
As shall, beside the cunning of their ground, 
Give cause to some of wonder, some despite, 
And more despair to imitate their sound. 
I that spend half my nights and all my days 
Here in a cell, to get a dark, pale face, 
To come forth with the ivy and the bays, 
And in this age can hope no better grace, — 



102 BEN JONSON. 

Leave me ! There 's something come into ray thought, 

That must and shall toe sung high and aloof, 

Safe from the wolfs black jaw, and the dull ass's hoof! " 

Accordingly, in 1603, he produced his weighty trage- 
dy of Sejanus, at Shakespeare's theatre. The Globe, — 
Shakespeare himself acting one of the inferior parts. 
Think of Shakespeare laboriously committing to mem- 
ory the blank verse of Jonson ! 

Though Sejanus failed of theatrical success, its wealth 
of knowledge and solid thought made it the best of 
all answers to his opponents. It was as if they had 
questioned his capacity to build a ship, and he had 
confuted them with a man-of-war. To be sure, they 
might reiterate their old charge of " filching by transla- 
tion," for the text of Sejanus is a mosaic ; but it was 
one of Jonson's maxims that he deserved as much 
honor for what he reproduced from the classics as for 
what he originated. Indeed, in his dealings with the 
great poets and historians of Rome, whose language and 
much of whose spirit he had patiently mastered, he acted 
the part, not of the pickpocket, but of the conqueror. 
He did not meanly crib and pilfer in the territories of 
the ancients : he rather pillaged, or, in our American 
phrase, " annexed " them. " He has done his robberies 
so openly," says Dryden, " that one sees he fears not 
to be taxed by any law. He invades authors like a 



BEN JONSON. 103 

monarch, and what would be theft in any other poet is 
only victory in him." 

One incident connected with the bringing out of Se- 
janus should not be omitted. Jonson told Drummond 
that the Earl of Northampton had a mortal enmity to 
him "for beating, on a St. George's day, one of his at- 
tenders " ; and he adds, that Northampton had him 
" called before the Councell for his Sejanus," and ac- 
cused him there both of " Poperie and treason." 

Jonson's relations with Shakespeare seem always to 
have been friendly ; and about this time we hear of 
them as associate members of the greatest of literary 
and of convivial clubs, — the club instituted by Sir 
Walter Raleigh, and known to all after-times as the 
" Mermaid," being so called from the tavern in which 
the meetings were held. Various, however, as were the 
genius and accomplishments it included, it lacked one 
phase of ability which has deprived us of all participa- 
tion in its wit and wisdom. It could boast of Shake- 
speare, and Jonson, and Raleigh, and Camden, and 
Beaumont, and Selden ; but, alas ! it had no Boswell to 
record its words, 

" So nimble, and so full of subtile flame." 
There are traditions of " wit-combats " between Shake- 
speare and Jonson ; and doubtless there was many a 
discussion between them touching the different principles 



104 BEN JONSON. 

on which their dramas were composed ; and then Ben, 
astride his high horse of the classics, probably blustered 
and harangued, and graciously informed the world's 
greatest poet that he sometimes wanted art and some- 
times sense, and candidly advised him to check the fatal 
rapidity and perilous combinations of his imagination, — ' 
while Shakespeare smilingly listened, and occasionally 
put in an ironic word, deprecating such austere criticism 
of a playwright like himself, who accommodated his art 
to the humors of the mob that crowded the " round O " 
of the Globe. There can be no question that Shake- 
speare saw Ben through and through, but he was not a 
man to be intolerant of foibles, and probably enjoyed 
the hectoring egotism of his friend as much as he appre- 
ciated his real merits. As for Ben, the transcendent 
genius of his brother dramatist pierced through even 
the thick hide of his self-sufficiency. " I did honor 
him," he finely says, " this side of idolatry, as much as 
any other man." 

On the accession of James of Scotland to the English 
throne, Jonson was employed by the court and city to 
design a splendid pageant for the monarch's reception ; 
and, with that absence of vindictiveness which some- 
what atoned for his arrogance, he gave his recent 
enemy, Dekkar, three fifths of the job. About the same 
time he was reconciled toMarston ; and in 1605 assisted 



BEN JONSON. 105 

him and Chapman in a comedy called " Eastward Hoe ! " 
One passage in this, reflecting on the Scotch, gave mor- 
tal offence to James's greedy countrj^men, who invaded 
England in his train, and were ravenous and clamorous 
for the spoils of office. Captain Seagul, in the play, 
praises what was then the new settlement of Virginia, 
as " a place without sergeants, or courtiers, or lawyers, 
or intelligencers, only a few industrious Scots perhaps, 
who indeed are dispersed over the whole earth. But as 
for them, there are no greater friends to Englishmen 
and England, when they are out on 't, in the world, than 
they are ; and, for my own part, I would a hundred 
thousand of them were there, for we are all one coun- 
trymen now, ye know, and we should find ten times 
more comfort of them there than we do here." This 
bitter taunt, which probably made the theatre roar with 
applause, was so represented to the king, that Marston 
and Chapman were arrested and imprisoned. Jonsop 
nobly insisted on sharing their fate ; and as he had 
powerful friends at court, and was esteemed by James 
himself, his course may have saved his friends from dis- 
graceful mutilations. A report was circulated that the 
noses and ears of all three were to be slit ; and Jonson 
tells us that, in an entertainment he gave to Camden, 
Selden, and other friends, after his liberation, his old 
mother exhibited a paper full of " lustie strong poison," 
5* 



106 BEN JONSON. 

which she said she had intended to mix in his drinh^ 
in case the threat of such a shameful punishment 
were officially announced. The phrase, " his drink," is 
very characteristic ; and, whatever liquid was meant, 
we may be sure tha^ it was not water, and that the good 
lady would have <^-Aily had numerous opportunities to 
mix the poison with it. 

The five years which succeeded his imprisonment 
carried Jonson to the height of his prosperity and glory. 
During this period he produced the three great come- 
dies on which his fame as a dramatist rests, — The Fox, 
The Silent Woman, and The Alchymist, — and also 
many of the most beautiful of those Masques, performed 
at court, in which the ingenuity, delicacy, richness, and 
elevation of his fancy found fittest expression. His 
social position was probably superior to Shakespeare's. 
He was really the Court Poet long before 1616, when 
he received the office, with a pension of a hundred 
marks. We have Clarendon's testimony to the fact that 
" his conversation was very good, and with men of the 
best note." Among his friends occurs the great name 
of Bacon. 

In 1618, when "Ben Jonson" had come to be a 
familiar name on the lips of all educated men in the 
island, he made his celebrated journey on foot to Scot- 
land, and was hospitably entertained by the nobility and 



BEN JONSONo 107 

gentry around Edinburgh. Taylor, the water poet, in 
his " Pennylesse Pilgrimage " to Scotland, has this 
amiable reference to him. " At Leith," he says, " I 
found my long approved and assured good friend, Mas- 
ter Benjamin Jonson, at one Master John Stuart's 
house. I thank him for his great kindness ; for, at my 
taking leave of him, he gave me a piece of gold of 
two-and-twenty shillings' value, to drink his health in 
England." One object of Jonson's journey w^s to 
visit the poet Drummond. He passed three or four 
weeks with Drummond at Hawthornden, and poured 
out his mind to him without reserve or stint. The fini- 
cal and fastidious poet was somewhat startled at this 
irruption of his burly guest into his dainty solitude, 
took notes of his free conversation, especially when he 
decried his contemporaries, and further performed the 
rites of ho'^pitality by adding a caustic, though keen, 
summary of his qualities of character. Thus, accord- 
ing to his dear friend's charitable analysis, Ben " was a 
great lover and praiser of himself; a contemner and 
scorner of others ; given rather t-^ losse a friend than a 
jest ; jealous of every word and action of those about 
him (especiallie after drink, which is one of the ele- 
ments in which he liveth) ; a dissembler of ill parts 
which raigne in him, a bragger of some good that he 
wanteth ; thinketh nothing well bot what either he him- 



108 BEN JONSON. 

self or some of his friends and countrymen have said or 
done ; he is passionately kynde and angry ; careless 
either to gaine or keep ; vindictive, but, if he be well 
answered, at himself." It is not much to the credit of 
Jonson's insight, that, after flooding his pensively taci- 
turn host with his boisterous and dogmatic talk, he 
parted with him under the impression that he was leav- 
ing an assured friend. Ah ! your demure listeners to 
your unguarded conversation, — they are the ones that 
give the fatal stabs ! 

A literal transcript of Drummond's original notes 
of Jonson's conversations, made by Sir Robert Sibbald 
about the year 1710, has been published in the collec- 
tions of the Shakespeare Society. This is a more ex- 
tended report than that included in Drummond's works, 
though still not so full as the reader might desire. The 
stoutness of Ben's character is felt in every utterance. 
Thus he tells Drummond that " he never esteemed of 
a man for the name of a lord," — a sentiment which he 
had expressed more impressively in his published epi- 
gram on Burleigh : — 

" Cecil, the grave, the wise, the great, the good, 
What is there more that can ennoble blood? " 

He had, it seems, " a minde to be a churchman, and, sg 
he might have favor to make one sermon to the King, 
he careth not what thereafter sould befall him ; for he 



BEN JONSON. 109 

would not flatter though he saw Death." Queen Eliza- 
beth is the mark of a most scandalous imputation, and 
the mildest of Ben's remarks respecting her is that she 
" never saw herself, after she became old, in a true glass ; 
they painted her, and sometymes would vermilion her 
nose." " Of all styles," he said, " he most loved to be 
named Honest, and hath of that one hundred letters 
so naming him." His judgments on other poets were 
insolently magisterial. " Spenser's stanzas pleased him 
not, nor his matter " ; Samuel Daniel was a good honest 
man, but no poet ; Donne, though <' the first poet in the 
world in some things," for " not keeping of accent, de- 
served hanging " ; Abram Fraunce, " in his English 
hexameters, was a foole " ; Sharpham, Day, and Dekkar 
were all rogues ; Francis Beaumont " loved too much 
himself and his own verses." Some biographical items 
in the record of these conversations are of interest. It 
seems that the first day of every new year the Earl of 
Pembroke sent him twenty pounds " to buy bookes.'^ 
By all his plays he never gained two hundred pounds. 
" Sundry tymes he hath devoured his bookes," that is, 
sold them .to supply himself with necessaries. When he 
was imprisoned for killing his brother actor in a duel, in 
the Queen's time, " his judges could get nothing of him 
to all their demands but I and No. They placed two 
damn'd villains, to catch advantage of him, with him, 



110 BEN JONSON. 

but he was advertised by his keeper '* ; and he added, as 
if the revenge was as terrible as the offence, " of the 
spies he hath ane epigrame." He told a few personal 
stories to Drummond, calculated to moderate our won- 
der that Mrs. Jonson was a shrew ; and, as they were 
boastingly told, we must suppose that his manners were 
not so austere as his verse. But perhaps the most 
characteristic image he has left of himself, through these 
conversations, is this : " He hath consumed a whole 
night in lying looking to his great toe, about which he 
hath seen Tartars and Turks, Romans and Carthagin- 
ians, feight in his imagination." 

Jonson's fortunes seem to have suffered little abate- 
ment until the death of King James, in 1625. Then 
declining popularity and declining health combined 
their malice to break the veteran down; and the re- 
maining twelve years of his life were passed in doing 
battle with those relentless enemies of poets, — want 
and disease. The orange — or rather the lemon — was 
squeezed, and both court and public seemed disposed to 
throw away the peel. In the epilogue to his play of 
The New Inn, brought out in 1630, the old tone of de- 
fiance is gone. He touchingly appeals to the audience 
as one who is " sick and sad " ; but, with a noble hu- 
mility, he begs they will refer none of the defects of the 
work to mental decay^ 



BEN JONSON. Ill 

" All that his weak and faltering tongue doth crave 
Is that you not refer it to his brain ; 
That 's yet unhurt, although set round with pain." 

The audience were insensible to this appeal. They 
found the play dull, and hooted it from the stage. Per- 
haps, after having been bullied so long, they took de- 
light in having Ben " on the hip." Charles the First, 
however, who up to this time seems to have neg- 
lected his father's favorite, now generously sent him 
a hundred pounds to cheer him in his misfortunes ; and 
shortly after he raised his salary, as Court Poet, from a 
hundred marks to a hundred pounds, adding, in compli- 
ment to Jonson's known tastes, a tierce of Canary, — a 
wine of which he was so fond as to be nicknamed, in 
ironical reference to a corpulence which rather assimi- 
lated him to the ox, " a Canary bird." It is to this 
period, we suppose, we must refer his testimony to his 
own obesity in his Epistle to my Lady Coventry. 

" So you have gained a Servant and a Muse : 
The first of which I fear you will refuse, 
And you may justly : being a tardy, cold, 
Unprofitable chattle, fat and old, 
Laden with belly, and doth hardly approach 
His fi-iends, but to break chairs or crack a coach. 
His weight is twenty stone, within two pound ; 
And that 's made up, as doth the purse abound." 

As his life declined, it does not appear that his dispo' 



112 BEN JONSON. 

sitlon was essentially modified. There are two charac- 
teristic references to him in his old age, which prove 
that Ben, attacked by palsy and dropsy, with a reputa- 
tion perceptibly waning, was Ben still. One is from Sir 
John Suckling's pleasantly malicious " Session of the 
Poets " : — 

" The first that broke silence was good old Ben, 
Prepared before with Canary wine, 
And he told them plainly he deserved the bays, 
For his were called works where others were but plays. 

" Apollo stopped him there, and bade him not go on ; 
'T was merit, he said, and not presumption, 
Must carry 't; at which Ben turned about, 
And in great choler offered to go out." 

That is a saucy touch, — that of Ben's rage when he is 
told that presumption is not, before Apollo, to take the 
place of merit, or even to back it ! 

The other notice is in a letter from Howell to 
Sir Thomas Hawk, written the year before Jonson's 
death : — 

" I was invited yesternight to a solemn supper by 
B. J,, where you were deeply remembered. There was 
good company, excellent cheer, choice wines, and jovial 
welcome. One thing intervened which almost spoiled 
the relish of the rest, — that B. began to engross all the 
discourse, to vapor extremely by himself, and, by vilify- 



BEN JONSON. 113 

ing others, to magnify his own Muse. For my part, I 
am content to dispense with the Roman infirmity of 
Ben, now that time has snowed upon his pericranium." 

But this snow of time, however it may have begun 
to cover up the massive quahties of his mind, seems to 
have left untouched his strictly poetic faculty. That 
shone out in his last hours, with more than usual splen- 
dor, in the beautiful pastoral drama of The Sad Shep- 
herd ; and it may be doubted if in the whole of his 
works any other passage can be found so exquisite in 
sentiment, fancy, and expression as the opening lines of 
this charming product of his old age. 

" Here she was wont to go ! and here ! and here ! 
Just where those daisies, pinks, and violets grow : 
The world may find the Spring by following her ; 
For other print her airy steps ne'er left : 
Her treading would not bend a blade of grass, 
Or shake the downy blow-ball from his stalk ! 
But like the soft west- wind she shot along, 
And where she went the flowers took thickest root, 
As she had sowed them with her odorous foot ! " 

Before he could complete The Sad Shepherd he was 
struck with mortal illness ; and the brave old man pre- 
pared to meet his last enemy, and, if possible, convert 
him into a friend. As early as 1606 he had returned 
to the English Church, after having been for twelve 
years a Romanist; and his penitent death-bed was 



114 BEN JONSON. 

attended by the Bishop of Winchester. He died in 
August, 1637, in his sixty-fourth year, and was buried 
in Westminster Abbey. The inscription on the com- 
mon pavement stone which was laid over his grave, 

" O RARE Ben Jonson ! " 

still expresses, after a lapse of two hundred years, the 
feelings of all readers of the English race. 

It must be admitted, however, that this epithet is 
sufficiently indefinite to allow widely differing estimates 
of the value of his works. In a critical view, the most 
obvious characteristic of his mind is its bulk ; but its 
creativeness bears no proportion to its massiveness. 
His faculties, ranged according to their relative strength, 
would fall into this rank : — first, Ben ; next, under- 
standing ; next, memory ; next, humor ; next, fancy ; 
and last and least, imagination. Thus, in the strictly 
poetic action of his mind, his fancy and imagination 
being subordinated to his other faculties, and not co-or- 
dinated with them, his whole nature is not kindled, and 
his best masques and sweetest lyrics give no idea of the 
general largeness of the man. In them the burly giant 
becomes gracefully petite; it is Fletcher's Omphale 
" smiling the club " out of the hand of Hercules, and 
making him, for the time, " spin her smocks." Now the 
greatest poetical creations of Shakespeare are those in 



BEN JONSON. 115 

which he is greatest in reason, and greatest in passion, 
and greatest in knowledge, as well as greatest in imagi- 
nation, — his poetic power being 

" Like to the fabled Cytherea's zone, 
Binding all things with beauty." 

His mind is " one entire and perfect chrysolite," while 
Jonson's rather suggests the pudding-stone. The poet 
in Ben being thus but a comparatively small portion 
of Ben, works by effort, rather than inspiration, and 
leaves the impression of ingenuity rather than inven- 
tiveness. But in his tragedies of Sejanus and Catiline, 
and especially in his three gre.at comedies of The Fox, 
The Alchymist, and The Silent Woman, the whole man 
is thrust forward, with his towering individuality, his 
massive understanding, his wide knowledge of the baser 
side of life, his relentless scorn of weakness and wicked- 
ness, his vivid memory of facts and ideas derived from 
books. They seem written with his fist. But, though 
they convey a powerful impression of his collective 
ability, they do not convey a poetic impression, and 
hardly an agreeable one. His strongest characters, as 
might be expected, are not heroes or martyrs, but cheats 
or dupes. His most magnificent cheat is Volpone, in 
The Fox ; his most magnificent dupe is Sir Epicure 
Mammon, in The Alchymist ; but in their most gor- 
geous mental rioting in imaginary objects of sense, the 



116 BEN JONSON. 

effect is produced by a dogged accumulation of suc- 
cessive images, which are linked by no train of strictly 
imaginative association, and are not fused into unity of 
purpose by the fire of passion-penetrated imagination. 

Indeed, it is a curious psychological study to watch 
the laborious process by which Jonson drags his thoughts 
and fancies from the reluctant and resisting soil of his 
mind, and then lays them, one after the other, with a 
deep-drawn breath, on his page. Each is forced into 
form by main strength, as we sometimes see a pillar 
of granite wearily drawn through the street by a score 
of straining oxen. Take, for example. Sir Epicure 
Mammon's detail of the luxuries he will revel in when 
his possession of the philosopher's stone shall have 
given him boundless wealth. The first cup of Canary 
and the first tug of invention bring up this enormous 
piece of humor : — 

" My flatterers 
Shall be tlie pure and gravest of divines 
That I can get for money." 

Then another wrench of the mind, and, it is to be feared, 
another swallow of the liquid, and we have this : — 

" My meat shall all come in in Indian shells, 
Dishes of agate, set in gold, and studded 
With emeralds, sapphires, hyacinths, and rubies." 

Glue that on, and now for another tug : — 



BEN JONSON. 117 

" My shirts 
I '11 have of taffeta-sarsnet, soft and light 
As cobwebs ; and for all mj other raiment, 
It shall be such as might provoke the Persian, 
Were he to teach the world riot anew." 

And then, a little heated, his imagination is stung into 
action, and this refinement of sensation flashes out : — 

" My gloves of fishes' and birds' skins perfumed 
With gums of Paradise and Eastern air.'' 

And now we have an extravagance jerked violently out 
from his logical fancy : — 

" I will have all my beds blown up, not stuffed ; 
Down is too hard." 

But all this patient accumulation of particulars, each 
costing a mighty ejBfort of memory or analogy, produces 
no cumulative effect. Certainly, the word " strains," as 
employed to designate the effusions of poetry, has a 
peculiar significance as applied to Jonson's verse. No 
hewer of wood or drawer of water ever earned his 
daily wages by a more conscientious putting forth of 
daily labor. Critics — and among the critics Ben is the 
most clamorous — call upon us to admire and praise the 
construction of his plays. But his plots, admirable of 
their kind, are still but elaborate contrivances of the 
understanding, all distinctly thought out beforehand by 
the method of logic, not the method of imagination i 



118 BEN JONSON. 

regular in external form, but animated by no living 
internal principle ; artful, but not artistic ; ingenious 
schemes, not organic growths ; and conveying the same 
kind of pleasure we experience in inspecting other 
mechanical contrivances. His method is neither the 
method of nature nor the method of art, but the method 
of artifice. A drama of Shakespeare may be compared 
to an oak ; a drama by Jon son to a cunningly fashioned 
box, made of oak-wood, with some living plants growing 
in it. Jonson is big ; Shakespeare is great. 

Still we say, " O rare Ben Jonson ! " A large, rude, 
clumsy, English force, irritable, egotistic, dogmatic, and 
quarrelsome, but brave, generous, and placable; with 
no taint of a malignant vice in his boisterous foibles ; 
with a good deal of the bulldog in him, but nothing 
of the spaniel, and one whose growl was ever worse 
than his bite ; — he, the bricklayer's apprentice, fighting 
his way to eminence through the roughest obstacles, 
capable of wrath, but incapable of falsehood, willing to 
boast, but scorning to creep, still sturdily keeps his hard- 
won position among the Elizabethan worthies as poet, 
playwright, scholar, man of letters, man of muscle and 
brawn ; as friend of Beaumont and Fletcher and Chap- 
man and Bacon and Shakespeare ; and as ever ready, 
in all places and at all times, to assert the manhood 
of Ben by tongue and pen and sword. 



MINOE ELIZABETHAN" DEAMATISTS. 

TN the present chapter we propose to consider six 
dramatists who were more immediately the contem- 
poraries of Shakespeare and Jonson, and who have the 
precedence in time, — and three of them, if we may be- 
lieve some critics, not altogether without claim to the 
precedence in merit, — of Beaumont and Fletcher, Mas- 
singer, and Ford. These are Heywood, Middleton, 
Marston, Dekkar, Webster, and Chapman. 

They belong to the school of dramatists of which 
Shakespeare was the head, and which is distinguished 
from the school of Jonson by essential differences of 
principle. Jonson constructed his plays on definite ex- 
ternal rules, and could appeal confidently to the critical 
understanding, in case the regularity of his plot and the 
keeping of his characters were called in question. 
Shakespeare constructed Ms, not according to any rules 
which could be drawn from the practice of other dram- 
atists, but according to those interior laws which the 
mind, in its creative action, instinctively divines and 
spontaneously obeys. In his case, the appeal is not to 
the understanding alone, but to the feelings and faculties 



120 MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 

wliich were concerned in producing the work itself; and 
tlie symmetry of the whole is felt by hundreds who 
could not frame an argument to sustain it. The laws to 
which his genius submitted were diflferent from those to 
which other dramatists had submitted, because the time, 
the circumstances, the materials, the purpose aimed at, 
were different. The time demanded a drama which 
should represent human life in all its diversity, and in 
which the tragic and comic, the high and the low, should 
be in juxtaposition, if not in combination. The dram- 
atists of whom we are about to speak represented them 
in juxtaposition, and rarely succeeded in vitally com- 
bining them so as to produce symmetrical works. Their 
comedy and tragedy, their humor and passion, move in 
parallel rather than in converging lines. They have di- 
versity ; but as their diversity neither springs from, nor 
tends to, a central principle of organization or of order, 
the result is often a splendid anarchy of detached scenes, 
more effective as detached than as related. Shakespeare 
alone had the comprehensive energy of impassioned 
imagination to fuse into unity the almost unmanageable 
materials of his drama, to organize this anarchy into a 
new and most complex order, and to make a world-wide 
variety of character and incident consistent with one- 
ness of impression. Jonson, not pretending to give his 
work this organic form, put forth his whole strength to 



MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 121 

give it mechanical regularity, every line in his solide?t 
plays costing him, as the wits said, '' a cup of sack." 
But the force implied in a Shakespearian drama, a force 
that crushes and dissolves the resisting materials into 
their elements, and recombines or fuses them into a new 
substance, is a force so different in kind from Jonson's, 
that it would, of course, be idle to attempt an estimate of 
its superiority in degree. And in regard to those minor 
dramatists who will be the subjects of the present essay, 
if they fall below Jonson in general ability, they nearly 
all afford scenes and passages superior to his best in 
depth of passioi), vigor of imagination, and audacious 
self-committal to the primitive instincts of the heart. 

The most profuse, but perhaps the least poetic of 
these dramatists, was Thomas Heywood, of whom little 
is known, except that he was one of the most prolific 
writers the world has ever seen. In 1598 he became 
an actor, or, as Henslowe, who employed him, phrases 
it, " came and hired himself to me as a covenanted 
servant for two years." The date of his first published 
drama is 1601 ; that of his last published work, a Gen- 
eral History of Women, is 1657. As early as 1633 he 
represents himself as having had an " entire hand, or at 
least a main finger," in two hundred and twenty plays, 
of which only twenty-three were printed. True it is, he 
says, " that my plays are not exposed to the world in 
6 



122 MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 

volumes, to bear the title of Works, as others : one rea- 
son is, that many of them, by shifting and change of 
companies, have been negligently lost ; others of them 
are still retained in the hands of some actors, who think it 
against their peculiar profit to have them come in print ; 
and a third, that it was never any great ambition in me 
to be in this kind voluminously read." It was said of 
him, by a contemporary, that " he not only acted every 
day, but also obliged himself to write a sheet every- 
day for several years ; but many of his plays being com- 
posed loosely in taverns, occasions them to be so mean." 
Besides his labors as a playwright, he worked as trans- 
lator, versifier, and general maker of books. Late in 
life he conceived the design of writing the lives of all 
the poets of the world, including his contemporaries. 
Had this project been carried out, we should have known 
something about the external life of Shakespeare ; for 
Heywood must have carried in his brain many of those 
facts which we of this age are most curious to know. 

Heywood's best plays evince large observation, con- 
siderable dramatic skill, a sweet and humane spirit, and 
an easy command of language. His style, indeed, is 
singularly simple, pure, clear, and straightforward ; but 
it conveys the impression of a mind so diffused as 
almost to be characterless, and incapable of flashing its 
thoughts through the images of imaginative passion. He 



MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 123 

is more prosaic, closer to ordinary life and character, 
than his contemporaries. Two of his plays, and the 
best of them all, A Woman Killed with Kindness, and 
The English Traveller, are thoroughly domestic dramas, 
the first, and not the worst, of their class. The plot of' 
The English Traveller is specially good ; and in read- 
ing few works of fiction do we receive a greater shock 
of surprise than in Geraldine's discovery of the infidel- 
ity of Wincott's wife, whom he loves with a Platonic 
devotion. It is as unanticipated as the discovery, in 
Jonson's Silent Woman, that Epicoene is no woman at 
all, while at the same time it has less the appearance 
of artifice, and is more the result of natural causes. 

With less fluency of diction, less skill in fastening the 
reader's interest to his fable, harsher in versification, 
and generally clumsier in construction, the best plays 
of Thomas Middleton are still superior to Heywood's 
in force of imagination, depth of passion, and fulness of 
matter. It must, however, be admitted that the senti- 
ments which direct his powers are not so fine as Hey- 
wood's. He depresses the mind, rather than invigorates 
it. The eye he cast on human life was not the eye of 
a sympathizing poet, but rather that of a sagacious 
cynic. His observation, though sharp, close, and vigi- 
lant, is somewhat ironic and unfeeling. His penetrating, 
incisive intellect cuts its way to the heart of a character 



124 MINOK ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 

as with a knife ; and if he lays bare its throbs of guilt 
and weakness, and lets you into the secrets of its 
organization, he conceives his whole work is performed. 
This criticism applies even to his tragedy of Women 
Beware Women, a drama which shows a deep study of 
the sources of human frailty, considerable skill in ex- 
hibiting the passions in their consecutive, if not in their 
conflicting action, and a firm hold upon character ; but 
it lacks pathos, tenderness, and humanity ; its power is 
out of all proportion to its geniality ; the characters, 
while they stand definitely out to the eye, are seen 
through no visionary medium of sentiment and fancy ; 
and the reader feels the force of Leantio's own agoniz- 
ing complaint, that his affliction is 

" Of greater weight than youth was made to bear, 
As if a punishment of after-life 
Were fall'n upon man here, so new it is 
To flesh and blood, so strange, so insupportable." 

There is, indeed, no atmosphere to Middleton's mind ; 
and the hard, bald caustic peculiarity of his genius, 
which is unpleasingly felt in reading any one of his 
plays, becomes a source of painful weariness as we plod 
doggedly through the five thick volumes of his works. 
Like the incantations of his own witches, it " casts a 
thick scurf over life." It is most powerfully felt in his 
tragedy of The Changeling, at once the most oppress- 



MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 125 

ivG and impressive effort of his genius. The character 
of De Flores in this play has in it a strangeness of 
iniquity, such as we think is hardly paralleled in the 
whole range of the Elizabethan drama. The passions 
of this brute-imp are not human. They are such as 
might be conceived of as springing from the union of 
animal with fiendish impulses, in a nature which knew 
no law outside of its own lust, and was as incapable of 
a scruple as of a sympathy. 

But of all the dramatists of the time, the most dis- 
agreeable in disposition, though by no means the least 
powerful in mind, was John Marston. The time of his 
birth is not known ; his name is entangled in contempo- 
rary records with that of another John Marston; and 
we may be sure that his mischief-loving spirit would 
have been delighted could he have anticipated that the 
antiquaries, a century after his death, would be driven to 
despair by the difficulty of discriminating one from the 
other. It is more than probable, however, that he was 
the John Marston who was of a respectable family in 
Shropshire, who took his bachelor's degree at Oxford in 
1592, and who was afterwards married to a daughter 
of a chaplain of James the First. Whatever may 
have been Marston's antecedents, they were such as to 
gratify his tastes as a cynical observer of the crimes and 
follies of men, — ■ an observer whose hatred of evil 



126 MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 

sprang from no love of good, but to whom the sight of 
depravity and baseness was welcome, inasmuch as it 
afforded him the occasion to indulge his own scorn and 
pride. His ambition was to be the English Juvenal ; 
and it must be conceded that he had the true lago-like 
disposition " to spy out abuses." Accordingly, in 1598, 
he published a series of venomous satires called The 
Scourge of Villanie, rough in versification, condensed 
in thought, tainted in matter, evincing a cankered more 
than a caustic spirit, and producing an effect at once 
indecent and inhuman. To prove that this scourging 
of villany, which would have put Mephistopheles to the 
blush, was inspired by no respect for virtue, he soon 
followed it up with a poem so licentious that, before it 
was circulated to any extent, it was suppressed by order 
of Archbishop Whitgift, and nearly all the copies de- 
stroyed. A writer could not be thus dishonored without 
being brought prominently into notice, and old Hens- 
lowe, the manager, was after him at once to secure his 
libellous ability for the Rose. Accordingly, we learn 
from Henslowe's diary, under date of September 28, 
1599, that he had lent to William Borne, " to lend unto 
John Mastone," " the new poete," " the sum of forty 
shillings," in earnest of some work not named. There 
is an undated letter of Marston to Henslowe, written 
probably in reference to this matter, which is character- 
istic in its disdainfully confident tone. Thus it runs : -^ 



MINOE ELIZABETHAN DRA^JATISTS. 127 

" Mr. Henslowe, at the Rose on the Bankside. 

" If you like my playe of Columbus, it is verie well, 
and you shall give me noe more than twentie poundes for 
it, but If nott, lett me have it by the Bearer againe, as 
I know the kinges men will freelie give me as much for 
it, and the profitts of the third daye moreover. 
" Soe I rest yours, 

" John Marston." 

He seems not to have been popular among the band 
of dramatists he now joined, and it is probable that his 
insulting manners were not sustained by corresponding 
courage. Ben Jonson had many quarrels with him, 
both literary and personal, and mentions one occasion 
on which he beat him and took away his pistol. His 
temper was Italian, rather than English, and one would 
conceive of him as quicker with the stiletto than the fist. 
His connection with the stage ceased, in 1613, after he 
had produced a number of dramas, of which nine have 
been preserved. He died about twenty years after- 
wards, in 1634, seemingly in comfortable circumstances. 

Marston's plays, whether comedies or tragedies, all 
bear the mark of his bitter and misanthropic spirit, — 
a spirit that seemed cursed by the companionship of its 
own thoughts, and forced them out through a well- 
grounded fear that they would fester if left within. His 



128 MINOE ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 

comedies of The Malcontent, The Fawn, and What 
You Will, have no genuine mirth, though an abundance 
of scornful wit, — ^of wit which, in his own words, 
" stings, blisters, galls off the skin, with the acrimony 
of its sharp quickness." The baser its objects, the 
brighter its gleam. It is stimulated by the desire to 
give pain, rather than the wish to communicate pleas- 
ure. Marston is not without sprightliness, but his 
sprightliness is never the sprightliness of the kid, though 
it is sometimes that of the hyena, and sometimes that 
of the polecat. In his Malcontent he probably drew a 
flattering likeness of his inner self: yet the most com- 
passionate reader of the play would experience little 
prty in seeing the Malcontent hanged. So much, in- 
deed, of Marstpn's satire is directed at depravity, that 
Ben Jonson used to say that " Marston wrote his father- 
in-law's preachings, and his father-in-law- his comedies." 
It is to be hoped, however, that the spirit of the chap- 
lain's tirades against sins was not, like his son-in-law's, 
worse than the sins themselves. 

If Marston's comic vein is thus, to use one of Dek- 
kar's phrases, that of " a thorny-toothed rascal," it may 
be supposed that his tragic is a still fiercer libel on 
humanity. His tragedies, indeed, though not without 
a gloomy power, are extravagant and horrible in con- 
ception and conduct. Even when he copies, he makes 



I MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 129 

the thing his own by caricaturing it. Thus the plot 
of Antonio' 3 Revenge is plainly taken from Hamlet, 
but it is Hamlet passed through Marston's intellect and 
imagination, and so debased as to look original. Still, 
the intellect in Marston's tragedies strikes the reader as 
forcible in itself, and as capable of achieving excellence, 
if it could only be divorced from the bad disposition and 
dt'formed conscience which direct its exercise. He has 
iancy, and he frequently stutters into imagination ; but 
the imp that controls his heart corrupts his taste and 
taints his sense of beauty, and the result is that he has 
a malicious satisfaction in deliberately choosing words 
whose uncouthness finds no extenuation in their expres- 
siv^eness, and in forging elaborate metaphors which dis- 
gust rather than delight. His description of a storm at 
sea is among the least unfavorable specimens of this 
perversion of his poetical powers : — 

" The sea grew mad; 

Strait swarthy darkness popt out Phoebus' eye, 
And blurred the jocund face of bright-cheek' d day; 
Whilst cruddled fogs masked even darkness' brow ; 
Heaven bade 's good night, and the rocks groaned 
At the intestine uproar of the main." 

It must be allowed that both his tragedies and come- 
dies are full of strong and striking thoughts, which 

6* I 



130 MINOE ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 

show a searching inquisition into the worst parts of hu- 
man nature. Occasionally he expresses a general truth 
with great felicity, as when he says, 

" Pygmy cares 
Can shelter under patience' shield ; but giant griefs 
WiU burst all covert." 

His imagination is sometimes stimulated into unusual 
power in expressing the fiercer and darker passions ; as, 
for example, in this image : — 

" 0, my soul 's enthro&ed 
In the triumphant chariot of revenge ! " 

And in this : — 

" Ghastly Amazement, with upstarted hair, 
Shall hurry on before, and usher us. 
Whilst trumpets clamor with a sound of death." 

He has three descriptions of morning, which seem to 
have been written in emulation of Shakespeare's in 
Hamlet ; two of them being found in the tragedy which 
Hamlet suggested. 

" Is not yon gleam the shuddering morn that flakes 
With silver tincture the east verge of heaven ? 

For see the dapple-gray coursers of the morn 
Beat up the light with their bright silver hoofs, 
And chase it through the sky. 

Darkness is fled ; look, infant morn hath drawn 



MINOE ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 131 

Bright silver curtains 'bout the couch of night; 
And now Aurora's horse trots azure rings, 
Breathing fair hght about the firmament." 

These last two lines appear feeble enough as con- 
trasted with the beautiful intensity of imagination in 
Emerson's picturing of the same scene : — 

" 0, tenderly the haughty Day 
Fills his blue urn mthjire.^' 

The most beautiful passage in Mars ton's plays is the 
lament of a father over the dead body of his son, who 
has been defamed. It is so apart from his usual style, 
as to breed the suspicion that the worthy chaplain's 
daughter, whom he made Mrs. Marston, must have 
given it to him from her purer imagination : — 

" Look on those lips, 
Those now lawn piUows, on whose tender softness 
Chaste modest speech, stealing from out his breast, 
Had wont to rest itself, as loath to post 
From out so fair an inn : look, look, they seem 
To stir, 
And breathe defiance to black obloquy." 

If among the dramatists of the period any person 
could be selected who in disposition was the opposite of 
Marston, it would be Thomas Dekkar, — a man whose 
inborn sweetness and gleefulness of soul carried him 
through vexations and miseries which would have 



132 MINOE ELIZABETHAN DRAxMATISTS. 

crushed a spirit less hopeful, cheerful, and humane. He 
was probably born about the year 1575 ; commenced 
his career as player and playwright before 1598 ; and 
for forty years was an author by profession, that is, was 
occupied in fighting famine with his pen. The first 
intelligence we have of him is characteristic of his 
whole life. It is from Henslowe's diary, under date of 
February, 1598 : " Lent unto the company, to discharge 
Mr. Decker out of the counter in the powltry, the sum 
of 40 shillings." Oldys tells us that " he was in King's 
Bench Prison from 1613 to 1616"; and the antiquary 
adds ominously, " how much longer I know not." Indeed, 
Dr. Johnson's celebrated enumeration of the scholar's 
experiences would stand for a biography of Dekkar : — 

"Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail." 

This forced familiarity with poverty and distress does 
not seem to have imbittered his feelings or weakened 
the force and elasticity of his mind. He turned his 
calamities into commodities. If indigence threw him 
into the society of the ignorant, the wretched, and the 
depraved, he made the knowledge of low life he thus 
obtained, serve his purpose as dramatist or pamphleteer. 
Whatever may have been the effect of his vagabond 
habits on his principles, they did not stain the sweetness 
and purity of his sentiments. There is an innocency in 



MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 133 

his very coarseness, and a brisk, bright good-nature 
chirps in his very scurrility. In the midst of distresses 
of all kinds, he still seems, like his own Fortunatus, 
" all felicity up to the brims " ; but that his content with 
Fortune is not owing to an unthinking ignorance of her 
caprice and injustice is proved by the words he puts into 
her mouth : — 

" This world is Fortune's ball wherewith she sports. 
Sometimes I strike it up into the air, 
And then create I emperors and kings ; 
Sometimes I spurn it, at which spurn crawls out 
The wild beast multitude : curse on, you fools, 
'T is I that tumble princes from their thrones, 
And gild false brows with glittering diadems ; 
'T is I that tread on necks of conquerors, 
And when like semi-gods they have been drawn 
In ivory chariots to the Capitol, 
Circled about with wonder of all eyes. 
The shouts of every tongue, love of all hearts. 
Being swoln with their own greatness, I have pricked 
The bladder of their pride, and made them die 
As water-bubbles (without memory): 
I thrust base cowards into honor's chair, 
Whilst the true-spirited soldier stands by 
Bareheaded, and all bare, whilst at his scars 
They scoff, that ne'er durst view the face of wars. 
I set an idiot's cap on virtue's head, 
Turn learning out of doors, clothe wit in rags, 
And paint ten thousand images of loam 
In gaudy silken colors: on the backs 



134 MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 

Of mules and asses I make asses ride, 
Only for sport to see the apish world 
Worship such beasts with sound idolatry. 
. This Fortune does, and when aU this is done, 
She sits and smiles to hear some curse her name, 
And some with adoration crown her fame." 

The boundless beneficence of Dekkar's heart is spe- 
cially embodied in the character of the opulent lord, Ja- 
como Gentili, in his play of The Wonder of a King- 
dom. When Gentili's steward brings him the book in 
which the amount of his charities is recorded, he ex- 
claims impatiently : — 

" Thou vain vainglorious fool, go burn that book; 
No herald needs to blazon charity's arms. 

I lamich not forth a ship, with drums and guns 
And trumpets, to proclaim my gallantry ; 
He that will read the wasting of my gold 
Shall find it writ in ashes, which the wind 
Will scatter ere he spells it." 

He will have neither wife nor children. When, he 

says, 

" I shall have one hand in heaven. 

To write my happiness in leaves of stars, 
A wife would pluck me by the other down. 
This bark has thus long sailed about the world, 
My soul the pilot, and yet never listened 
To such a mermaid's song. 



MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 135 

My heirs shall be poor children fed on alms : 

Soldiers that want limbs ; scholars poor and scorned ; 

And these will be a sure inheritance 

Not to decay ; manors and towns will fall, 

Lordships and parks, pastures and woods, be sold; 

But this land still continues to the lord : 

No tricks of law can me beguile of this. 

But of the beggar's dish, I shall drink healths 

To last forever ; whilst I live, my roof 

Shall cover naked wretches ; when I die, 

'T is dedicated to St. Charity." 

We should not do justice to Dekkar's dispositioiij 
even after these quotations, did we omit that enumer- 
ation of positives and negatives which, in his view, 
make up the character of the happy man : — 

" He that in the sun is neither beam nor moat, 
He that 's not mad after a petticoat. 
He for whom poor men's curses dig no grave, 
He that is neither lord's nor lawyer's slave, 
He that makes This his sea and That his shore. 
He that in 's coffin is richer than before. 
He that counts Youth his sword and Age his staff, 
He whose right hand carves his own epitaph. 
He that upon his death-bed is a swan. 
And dead no crow, — he is a Happy Man." 

As Dekkar wrote under the constant goad of neces- 
sity, he seems to have been indifferent to the require- 
ments of art. That " wet-eyed wench, Care," was as 



136 MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 

absent from his ink, as from his soul. Even his best 
plays, Old Fortunatus, The Wonder of a Kingdom, and 
another whose title cannot be mentioned, are good in 
particular scenes and characters rather than good as 
wholes. Occasionally, as in the character of Signior 
Orlando Friscobaldo, he strikes off a fresh, original, and 
masterly creation, consistently sustained throughout, and 
charming us by its lovableness, as well as thrilling us by 
its power ; but generally his sentiment and imagination 
break upon us in unexpected felicities, strangely better 
than what surrounds them. These have been culled by 
the affectionate admiration of Lamb, Hunt, and Hazlitt, 
and made familiar to all English readers. To prove 
how much finer, in its essence, his genius was than the 
genius of so eminent a dramatist as Massinger, we only 
need to compare Massinger's portions of the play of The 
Virgin Martyr with Dekkar's. The scene between Doro- 
thea and Angelo, in which she recounts her first meeting 
with him as a " sweet-faced beggar-boy," and the scene in 
which Angelo brings to Theophilus the basket of fruits 
and flowers which Dorothea has plucked in Paradise, 
are inexpressibly beautiful in their exquisite subtlety 
of imagination and artless elevation of sentiment. It is 
difficult to understand how a writer capable of such 
refinements as these should have left no drama which is 
a part of the classical literature of his country. 



MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 137 

One of these scenes — that between Dorothea, the 
Virgin Martyr, and Angelo, an angel who waits upon 
her in the disguise of a page — we cannot refrain from 
quoting, familiar as it must be to many readers : — 

" Dor. My book and taper. 

" Ang. Here, most holy mistress. 

" Dor. Thy voice sends forth such music, that I never 

Was ravished with a more celestial sound. 

Were every servant in the world like thee, 

So full of goodness, angels would come down 

To dwell with us : thy name is Angelo, 

And like that name thou art. Get thee to rest; 

Thy youth with too much watching is oppressed. 

" Ang. No, my dear lady; I could weary stars, 
And force the wakeful moon to lose her eyes, 
By my late watching, but to wait on you. 
When at your prayers you kneel before the altar, 
Methinks I 'm singing with some quire in heaven, 
So blest I hold me in your company. 
Therefore, my most loved mistress, do not bid 
Your boy, so serviceable, to get hence. 
For then you break his heart. 

" Dor. Be nigh me still then. 
In golden letters down I '11 set that day 
Which gave thee to me. Little did I hope 
To meet such worlds of comfort in thyself. 
This little pretty body, when I, coming 
Forth of the temple, heard my beggar-boy, 
My sweet-faced, godly beggar boy, crave an alms, 
Which with glad hand I gave, — with lucky hand ! 
And when I took thee home, my most chaste bosom 



138 MlJsIOR ELIZABETHAN DKAMATISTS. 

Methought was filled with no hot wanton fire, 
But with a holy flame, mounting since higher, 
On wings of cherubim, than it did before. 

" Ang. Proud am I that my lady's modest eye 
So likes so poor a servant. 

" Dor. I have offered 

Handfuls of gold but to behold thy parents. 
I would leave kingdoms, were I queen of some, 

To dwell with thy good father 

Show me thy parents 5 
Be not ashamed. 

^^ Ang. I am not: I did never 

Know who my mother was ; but by yon palace, 
Filled with bright heavenly courtiers, I dare assure you, 
And pawn these eyes upon it, and this hand. 
My father is in heaven ; and, pretty mistress. 
If your illustrious hom"-glass spend his sand. 
No worse than yet it does, upon my life, 
You and I both shall meet my father there. 
And he shall bid you welcome. 

" Dor. blessed day ! 

We all long to be there, but lose the way." 

But the passage in all Dekkar's works which will be 
most likely to immortalize his name is that often-quoted 
one, taken from a play whose very name is unmention- 
able to prudish ears : — 

" Patience, my lord ! why, 't is the soul of peace ; 
Of all the virtues, 't is nearest kin to heaven ; 
It makes men look like gods. — The best of men 
That e'er wore earth about him was a Sufferer, 



MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 139 

A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit ; 
The first true gentleman that ever breathed." 

A more sombre genius than Dekkar, though a genius 
more than once associated with his own in composition, 
was John Webster, of whose biography nothing is cer- 
tainly known, except that he was a member of the 
Merchant Tailors' Company. His works have been 
thrice republished within thirty years ; but the perusal 
of the whole does not add to the impression left on the 
mind by his two great tragedies. His comic talent was 
small ; and for all the mirth in his comedies of West- 
ward Hoe and Northward Hoe we are probably in- 
debted to his associate, Dekkar. His play of Appius 
and Virginia is far from being an adequate rendering of 
one of the most beautiful and affecting fables that ever 
crept into history. The Devil's Law Case, a tragi- 
comedy, has not sufficient power to atone for the want 
of probability in the plot and want of nature in the 
characters. The historical play of Sir Thomas Wyatt 
can only be fitly described by using the favorite word 
in which Ben Jonson was wont to condense his critical 
opinions, — " It is naught." But The White Devil and 
The Duchess of Malfy are tragedies which even so rich 
and varied a literature as the English could not lose 
without a sensible diminution of its treasures. 

Webster was one of those writers whose genius con- 



140 MINOK ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 

sists in the expression of special moods, and who, outside 
of those moods, cannot force their creative faculties into 
vigorous action. His mind by instinctive sentiment was 
directed to the contemplation of the darker aspects of 
life. He brooded over crime and misery until his 
imagination was enveloped in their atmosphere, found a 
fearful joy in probing their sources and tracing their 
consequences, became strangely familiar with their 
physiognomy and psychology, and felt a shuddering 
sympathy with their " deep groans and terrible ghastly 
looks." There was hardly a remote corner of the soul, 
which hid a feeling capable of giving mental pain, 
into which this artist in agony had nt)t curiously peered ; 
and his meditations on the mysterious disorder pro- 
duced in the human consciousness by the rebound of 
thoughtless or criminal deeds might have found fit ex- 
pression in the lines of a great poet of our own 
times : — 

" Action is momentary, — 
The motion of a muscle, this way or that. 
Suffering is long, obscure, and infinite." 

With this proclivity of his imagination, Webster's 
power as a dramatist consists in confining the domain 
of his tragedy within definite limits, in excluding all 
variety of incident and character which could interfere 
with his main design of awaking terror and pity, and m 



MINOK ELIZABETHAN DKAMATISTS. 141 

the intensity with which he arrests, and the tenacity 
with which he holds the attention, as he drags the mind 
along the pathway which begins in misfortune or guilt, 
and ends in death. He is such a spendthrift of his 
stimulants, and accumulates horror on horror, and crime 
on crime, with such fatal facility, that he would 
render the mind callous to his terrors, were it not 
that what is acted is still less than what is suggested, 
and that the souls of his characters are greater than 
their sufferings or more terrible than their deeds. The 
crimes and the criminals belong to Italy as it was in the 
sixteenth century, when poisoning and assassination 
were almost in the fashion ; the feelings with which 
they are regarded are English ; and the result of the 
combination is to make the poisoners and assassins more , 
fiendishly malignant in spirit than they actually wereJ 
Thus Ferdinand, in the Duchess of Malfy, is the concep- 
tion formed by an honest, deep-thoughted Englishman 
of an Italian duke and politician, who had been educated 
in those maxims of policy which were generalized by 
Machiavelli. Webster makes him a devil, but a devil 
with a soul to be damned. The Duchess, his sister, is 
discovered to be secretly married to her steward ; and in 
connection with his brother, the Cardinal, the Duke not 
only resolves on her death, but devises a series of pre- 
liminary mental torments to madden and break down her 



142 MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 

proud spirit. The first is an exhibition of wax figures, 
representing her husband and children as they appeared 
in death. Then comes a dance of madmen, with dismal 
howls and songs and speeches. Then a tomb-maker 
whose talk is of the charnel-house, and who taunts her 
with her mortality. She interrupts his insulting homily 
with the exclamation, " Am I not thy Duchess ? " 
" Thou art," he scornfully replies, " some great woman 
sure, for riot begins to sit on thy forehead (clad in gray 
hairs) twenty years sooner than on a merry milkmaid's. 
Thou sleepest worse than if a mouse should be forced 
to take up her lodging in a cat' s ear ; a little infant that 
breeds its teeth, should it lie with thee, would cry out, 
as if thou wert the more unquiet bedfellow." This 
mockery only brings from her firm spirit the proud 
assertion, "I am Duchess of Malfy still." Indeed, 
her mind becomes clearer and calmer as the tor- 
tures proceed. At first she had imprecated curses 
on her brothers, and cried, 

" Plagues that make lanes through largest families, 
Consume them ! " 

But now, when the executioners appear, when her 
dirge is sung, containing those tremendous lines, 

" Of what is 't fools make such vam keeping ? 
Sin their conception, their birth weeping, 
Their life a general mist of error, 
Their death a hideous storm of terror," — 



I\II:mOR ELIZABETHAN DRA;vIATISTS. 143 



■when all that malice could suggest for her torment has 
been expended and the ruffians who have been sent to 
murder her approach to do their office, her attitude is 
that of quiet dignity, forgetful of her own sufferings, 
solicitous for others. Her attendant, Cariola, screams 
out, 

" Hence, villains, tyrants, murderers, alas ! 
What will you do with my lady ? Call for help. 

" Duchess. To whom, — to our next neighbors ? 
They are mad folks. 

" Bosola. Remove that noise. 

'■''Duchess. Farewell, Cariola. 
In my last will I have not much to give : 
A many hungry guests have fed upon me ; 
Thine will be a poor reversion. 

" Cariola. I will die with her. 

" Duchess. I pray thee, look thou giv'st my little boy 
Some s}Tup for his cold, and let the girl 
Say her prayers ere she sleep. Now what you please : 
What death? 

" Bosola. Strangling ; here are yom' executioners. 

" Duchess. Pull, and pull strongly, for your able strength 
Must pull down heaven upon me : 
' Yet stay, heaven-gates are not so highly arched 
As princes' palaces ; they that e^ter there 
Must go upon their knees. Come^ vJolent d'iath^ 
Serve for mandragora to make me sl^ep^ 
Go, tell my brothers ; when I am laid out. 
They then may feed in quiet." 



* 
144 MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 



The strange, unearthly stupor which precedes the 
remorse of Ferdinand for her murder is true to nature, 
and especially his nature. Bosola, pointing to the dead 
body of the Duchess, says, 

" Fix your eye here. 

" Ferd. Constantly. 

" Bosola. Do you not weep ? 

Other sins only speak ; murther shrieks out : 
The element of water moistens the earth, 
But blood flies upwards and bedews the heavens. 

'■'■Ferd. Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle: 
She died young. 

" Bosola. I think not so ; her infelicity 

Seemed to have years too many. 

" Ferd. She and I were twins : 

And should I die this instant, I had lived 
Her time to a minute." 

We have said that Webster's peculiarity is the te- 
nacity of his hold on the mental and moral constitution 
of his characters. We know of their appetites and pas- 
sions only by the effects of these on their souls. He has 
properly no sensuousness. Thus in The White Devil, 
his other great tragedy, the events proceed from the 
passion of Brachiano for Vittoria Corombona, — a pas- 
sion so intense as to lead one to order the murder of 
his wife, and the other the murder of her husband. If 
either Fletcher or Ford had attempted the subject, the 
sensual and emotional motives to the crime would have 



MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 145 

been represented with overpowering force, and expressed 
in the most alluring images, so that wickedness would 
have been almost resolved into weakness ; but Webster 
lifts the wickedness at once from the region of the 
senses into the region of the soul, exhibits its results in 
spiritual depravity, and shows the satanic energy of pur- 
pose which may spring from the ruins of the moral will. 
There is nothing lovable in Vittoria ; she seems, indeed, 
almost without sensations; and the affection between 
her and Brachiano is simply the magnetic attraction 
which one evil spirit has for another evil spirit. Fran- 
cisco, the brother of Brachiano's wife, says to him : — 

" Thou hast a wife, our sister ; would I had given 
Both her white hands to death, bound and locked fast 
In her last winding-sheet, when I gave thee 
But one." 

This is the language of the intensest passion, but as 
applied to the adulterous lover of Vittoria it seems little 
more than the utterance of reasonable regret ; for devil 
only can truly mate with devil, and Vittoria is Brachi- 
ano's real " affinity." 

The moral confusion they produce by their deeds is 
traced with more than Webster's usual steadiness of 
nerve and clearness of vision. The evil they inflict is 
a cause of evil in others ; the passion which leads to 
murder rouses the fiercer passion which aches for ven- 
7 J 



146 MINOE ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 

geance ; and at last, when the avengers of crime have 
become morally as bad as the criminals, they are all 
involved in a common destruction. Vittoria is probably 
Webster's most powerful delineation. Bold, bad, proud, 
glittering in her baleful beauty, strong in that evil cour- 
age which shrinks from crime as little as from danger, 
she meets her murderers with the same self-reliant 
scorn with which she met her judges. " Kill her attend- 
ant first," exclaims one of them. 

" Vittoria. You shall not kill her first; behold my breast: 
I will be waited on in death ; my servant 
Shall never go before me. 

" Gasparo. Are you so brave ? 

" Vittoria. Yes, I shall welcome death, 
As princes do some great ambassadors ; 
I '11 meet thy weapon half-way. 

" Lodovico. Strike, strike, 

With a joint motion. 

" Vittoria. 'T was a manly blow; 

The next thou giv'st, murder some sucking infant, 
And then thou wilt be famous." 

Webster tells us, in the Preface to The White 
Devil, that he does not "write with a goose-quill 
winged with two feathers " ; and also hints that the play 
failed in representation through its being acted in win- 
ter in " an open and black theatre," and because it 
wanted " a full and understanding auditory." " Since 
that time," he sagely adds, " I have noted most of the 



MINOE ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 147 

people that come to the playhouse resemble those ig- 
norant asses who, visiting stationers' shops, their use is 
not to inquire for good books, but new books." And 
then comes the ever-recurring wail of the playwright, 
Elizabethan as well as Georgian, respecting the taste 
of audiences. "Should a man," he says, "present to 
such an auditory the most sententious tragedy that ever 
was written, observing all the critical laws, as height of 
style and gravity of person, enrich it with the senten- 
tious chorus, and, as it were, enliven death in the pas- 
sionate and weighty Nuntius ; yet after all this divine 
rapture, dura messorum ilia, the breath that comes 
from the uncapable multitude is able to poison it." 

Of all the contemporaries of Shakespeare, Webster is 
the most Shakespearian. His genius was not only 
influenced by its contact with one side of Shakespeare's 
many-sided mind, but the tragedies we have been con- 
sidering abound in expressions and situations either 
suggested by or directly copied from the tragedies of 
him he took for his model. Yet he seems to have had 
no conception of the superiority of Shakespeare to all 
other dramatists ; and in his Preface to The "White 
Devil, after speaking of the " full and heightened style 
of Master Chapman, the labored and understanding 
works of Master Jonson, the no less worthy composures 
of the both worthily excellent Master Beaumont and 



148 MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 

Master Fletcher," lie adds his approval, " without 
wrong last to be named," of "the right liappy and 
copious industry of Master Shakespeare, Master Dek- 
kar, and Master Heywood." This is not half so felici- 
tous a classification as would be made by a critic of our 
century, who should speak of the " right happy and 
copious industry " of Master Goethe, Master Dickens, 
and Master G. P. R. James. 

Webster's reference, however, to " the full and 
heightened style of Master Chapman " is more appro- 
priate ; for no writer of that age impresses us more by 
a certain rude heroic height of character than George 
Chapman. Born in 1559, and educated at the Univer- 
sity of Oxford, he seems, on his first entrance into 
London life, to have acquired the patronage of the 
noble, and the friendship of all who valued genius and 
scholarship. He was among the few men whom Ben 
Jonson said he loved. His greatest performance, and it 
was a gigantic one, was his translation of Homer, which, 
in spite of obvious faults, excels all other translations in 
the power to rouse and lift and inflame the mind. 
Some eminent painter, we believe Barry, said that, 
when he went into the street after reading it, men 
seemed ten feet high. Pope averred that the transla- 
tion of the Iliad might be supposed to have been written 
by Homer before he arrived at years of discretion ; and 



MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 149 

Coleridge declares the version of the Odyssey to be a& 
truly an original poem as the Faery Queen. Chapman 
himself evidently thought that he was the first transla- 
tor who had been admitted into intimate relations with 
Homer's soul, and who had caught by direct contact the 
sacred fury of his inspiration. He says finely of those 
who had attempted the work in other languages : — 

" They failed to search his deep and treasurous heart. 
The cause was, since they wanted the fit key 
Of Nature, in tiieir downright strength of art, 
With Poesy to open Poesy." 

Chapman was also a voluminous dramatist, and of his 
many comedies and tragedies some sixteen were printed. 
It is to be feared that the last twenty years of his long 
and honorable life were passed in a desperate struggle 
for the means of subsistence. But his ideas of the 
dignity of his art were so inwoven into his character 
that he probably met calamity bravely. Poesy he early 
professed to prefer above all worldly wisdom, being 
composed, in his own words, of the " sinews and souls 
of all learning, wisdom, and trutli." " We have exam- 
ple sacred enough," he said, " that true Poesy's humil- 
ity, poverty, and contempt are badges of divinity, not 
vanity. Bray then, and bark against it, ye wolf-faced 
worldlings, that nothing but riches, honors, and magis- 
tracy " can content. " I (for my part) shall ever 



150 MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 

esteem it much more manly and sacred, in this harmless 
and pious study, to sit until I sink into my grave, than 
shine in your vainglorious bubbles and impieties ; all 
your poor policies, wisdoms, and their trappings, at no 
more valuing than a musty nut." These sentiments 
were probably fresh in his heart when, in 1634, 
friendless and poor, at the age of seventy-five, he died. 
Anthony Wood describes him as " a person of most 
reverend aspect, religious and temperate ; qualities," he 
spitefully adds, " rarely meeting in a poet." 

Chapman was a man with great elements in his 
nature, which were so imperfectly harmonized that 
what he was found but a stuttering expression in what 
he wrote and did. There were gaps in his mind; or, 
to use Victor Hugo's image, " his intellect was a 
book with some leaves torn out." His force, great as it 
was, was that of an Ajax, rather than that of an 
Achilles. Few dramatists of the time afford nobler 
passages of description and reflection. Few are wiser, 
deeper, manlier in their strain of thinking. But when 
we turn to the dramas from which these grand things 
have been detached, we find extravagance, confusion, 
huge thoughts lying in helpless heaps, sublimity in 
parts conducing to no general effect of sublimity, the 
movement lagging and unwieldy, and the plot urged on 
to the catastrophe by incoherent expedients. His 



MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 151 

imagination partook of the incompleteness of his in- 
tellect. Strong enough to clothe the ideas and emotions 
of a common poet, it was plainly inadequate to embody 
the vast, half-formed conceptions which gasped for ex- 
pression in his soul in its moments of poetic exaltation. 
Often we feel his meaning, rather than apprehend it. 
The imagery has the indefiniteness of distant objects 
seen by moonlight. There are whole passages in his 
works in which he seems engaged in expressing Chap- 
paan to Chapman, like the deaf egotist who only placed 
his trumpet to his ear when he himself talked. 

This criticism applies more particularly to his trage- 
jlies, and to his expression of great sentiments and 
passions. His comedies, though over-informed with 
thought, reveal him to us as a singularly sharp, shrewd, 
and somewhat cynical observer, sparkling with worldly 
wisdom, and not deficient in airiness any more than wit. 
Hazlitt, we believe, was the first to notice that Monsieur 
D'Olive, in the comedy of that name, is " the undoubted 
prototype of that light, flippant, gay, and infinitely de- 
lightful class of character, of the professed men of wit 
and pleasure about town, which we have in such perfec- 
tion in Wycherley and Congreve, such as Sparkish, Wit- 
would, Petulant, &c., both in the sentiments and the 
style of writing " ; and Tharsalio in The Widow's 
Tears, and Ludovico in May-Day, have the hard im- 



152 MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 

pudence and cynical distrust of virtue, the arrogant and 
glorying self-M?2righteousness, that distinguish another 
class of characters which the dramatists of the age of 
Charles and Anne were unwearied in providing with 
insolence and repartees. Occasionally we have a jest 
which Falstaff would not disown. Thus in May-Day, 
when Cuthbert, a barber, approaches Quintiliano, to 
get, if possible, " certain odd crowns " the latter owes 
him, Quintiliano says, " I think thou 'rt newly mar- 
ried ? " "I am indeed, sir," is the reply. " I thought 
so ; keep on thy hat, man, 't will be the less perceived." 
Chapman, in his comedies generally, shows a kind of 
philosophical contempt for woman, as a frailer and flim- 
sier, if fairer, creature than man, and he sustains his 
bad judgment with infinite ingenuity of wilful wit and 
penetration of ungracious analysis. In The Widow's 
Tears this unpoetic infidelity to the sex pervades the 
whole plot and sentiments, as well as gives edge to many 
an incisive sarcasm. " My sense," says Tharsalio, " tells 
me how short-lived widows' tears are, that their weep- 
ing is in truth but laughing under a mask, that they 
mourn in their gowns and laugh in their sleeves ; all 
of which I believe as a Delphian oracle, and am re- 
solved to burn in that faith." " He," says Lodovico, 
in May -Day, — he " that holds religious and sacred 
thought of a woman, he that holds so reverent a respect 



MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 153 

to her that he will not touch her but with a kist hand 
and a timorous heart, he that adores her Uke his god- 
dess, let him be sure she will shun him like her slave. 
.... Whereas nature made " women " but half fools, 
we make 'em all fool : and this is our palpable flattery 
of them, where they had rather have plain dealing." 
In all Chapman's comic writing there is something of 
Ben Jonson's mental self-assertion and disdainful glee 
in his own superiority to the weakness he satirizes. 

In passing from a comedy like May-Day to a tragedy 
like Bussy D'Ambois, we find some difficulty in recog- 
nizing the features of the same nature. Bussy D'Am- 
bois represents a mind not so much in creation as in 
eruption, belching forth smoke, ashes, and stones, no 
less than flame. Pope speaks of it as full of fustian ; 
but fustian is rant in the words when there is no corre- 
sponding rant in the soul, whilst Chapman's tragedy, 
like Marlowe's Tamburlaine, indicates a greater swell 
in the thoughts and passions of his characters than in 
their expression. The poetry is to Shakespeare's what 
gold ore is to gold. Veins and lumps of the precious 
metal gleam on the eye from the duller substance in 
which it is imbedded. Here are specimens : — 

" Man is a torch borne in the wind ; a dream 
But of a shadow, summed with all his substance ; 
And as great seamen, using all their wealth 
7# 



154 MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 

And skills in Neptune's deep invisible paths, 

In tall ships richly built and ribbed with brass, 

To put a girdle round about the world, 

When they have done it (coming near their haven) 

Are fain to give a warning piece, and call 

A poor strayed fisherman, that never past 

His country's sight, to waft and guide them in: 

So when we wander furthest through the waves 

Of glassy glory and the gulfs of state, 

Topped with all titles, spreading all our reaches, 

As if each private arm would sphere the earth, 

We must to Virtue for her guide resort. 

Or we shall shipwreck in our safest port." 

"In a king 
All places are contained. His words and looks 
Are like the flashes and the bolts of Jove ; 
His deeds inimitable, like the sea 
That shuts still as it opes, and leaves no tracks. 
Nor prints of precedent for mean men''s acts^ 

" His great heart will not down : 't is like the sea, 
That partly by his own internal heat. 
Partly the stars' daily and nightly motion, 
Their heat and light, and partly of the place 
The divers frames, but chiefly by the moon 
Bristled with surges, never will be won, 
(No, not when th' hearts of all those powers are burst,^ 
To make retreat into his settled home, 
TiU he be crowned with his own quiet foam." 

" Now, all ye peaceful regents of the night, 
Silently gliding exhalations, 



MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 155 

Languishing winds, and murmuring falls of waters, 
Sadness of heart, and ominous secureness, 
Enchantments, dead sleeps, all the friends of rest 
That ever wrought upon the life of man 
Extend your utmost strengths ; and this charmed hour 
Fix like the centre." 

" There is One 
That wakes above, whose eye no sleep can bind: 
He sees through doors and darkness and our thoughts." 

" 0, the dangerous siege 
Sin lays about us ! and the tyranny 
fle exercises when he hath expugned : 
Like to the horror of a winter's thunder, 
Mixed with a gushing storm, that suffer nothing 
To stir abroad on earth but their own rages. 
Is sin, when it hath gathered head above us." 

" Terror of darkness ! thou king of flames ! 
That with thy music-footed horse doth strike 
The clear light out of crystal, on dark earth, 
And hurl'st instinctive fire about the world. 
Wake, wake, the drowsy and enchanted night. 
That sleeps with dead eyes in this heavy riddle : 
thou great prince of shades, where never sun 
Sticks his far-darted beams, whose eyes are made 
To shine in darkness, and see ever best 
Where men are blindest ! open now the heart 
Of thy abashed oracle, that for fear 
Of some ill it includes would feign lie hid, 
And rise thou with it in thy greater light." 

It is hardly possible to read Chapman's serious verse 



156 MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. 

without feeling that he had in him the elements of a 
great nature, and that he was a magnificent specimen 
of what is called " irregular genius." And one of his 
poems, the dedication of his translation of the Iliad to 
Prince Henry, is of so noble a strain, and from so high 
a mood, that, while borne along with its rapture, we are 
tempted to place him in the first rank of poets and of 
men. You can feel and hear the throbs of the grand 
old poet's heart in such lines as these : — 

*' 0, 't is wondi'ous mucli, 
Though nothing prized, that the right virtuous touch 
Of a -weU-written soul to virtue moves ; 
Nor have we souls to purpose, if their loves 
Of fitting objects be not so inflamed. 
How much were then this kingdom's main soul maimed, 
To want this great inflamer of aU powers 
That move in human souls. 

Through all the pomp of kingdoms still he shines, 
And graceth aU his gracers. 

A prince's statue, or in marble carved, 

Or steel, or gold, and shrined, to be preserved, 

Aloft on pillars and pyramides, 

Time into lowest ruins may depress ; 

But drawn with all Ms virtues in learned verse, 

Fame shall resound them on oblivion's hearse. 

Till graves gasp with their blasts, and dead men rise." 



BEAUMONT AND FLETCHEE, MASSIK- 
GEE, AND FOED. 

"TXTE have seen, in what has been already said of 
" ' the intellectual habits of the Elizabethan dram- 
atists, that it was a common practice for two, three, 
four, and sometimes five writers to co-operate in the 
production of one play. Thus Dekkar and Webster 
were partners in writing Northward Hoe ! and West- 
ward Hoe ! Ben Jonson, Marston, and Chapman in 
writing Eastward Hoe ! Drayton, Middleton, Dekkar, 
Webster, and Munday, in writing The Two Harpies. 
In the case of Webster and Dekkar, this union was 
evidently formed from a mutual belief that the som- 
bre mind of the one was unsuited to the treatment 
of certain scenes and characters which were exactly 
in harmony with the sunny genius of the other ; 
but the alliance was often brought about by the de- 
mand of theatre-managers for a new play at a short 
notice, in which case the dramatist who had the job 
hurriedly sketched the plan, and then applied to his 
brother playwrights to take shares in the enterprise, 
payable in daily or weekly instalments of mirth oi* 



158 BEAUMONT AND FLETCHEE. 

passion. But there were two writers of the period, 
twins in genius, and bound together by more than 
brotherly affection, whose Uterary union was so much 
closer than the occasional combinations of other dram- 
atists, that it is now difficult to dissociate, in the public 
mind, Francis Beaumont from John Fletcher, or even 
to change the order of their names, though it can easily 
be proved that the firm of Beaumont and Fletcher owes 
by far the greater portion of its capital to the teeming 
brain of the second partner. 

The materials for their biographies are scanty. Beau- 
mont was the son of a judge, was born about the year 
1586, resided a short period at Oxford, but left without 
taking a degree, and, at the age of fifteen, was entered a 
member of the Inner Temple. Fletcher, the son of 
the " courtly and comely " Bishop Fletcher, was born 
in December, 1579, and was educated at Cambridge, but 
seems to have been designed for no profession. At what 
time and under what circumstances the poets met we 
have no record. The probability is, that, as both were 
esteemed by Ben Jonson, it was he who brought them 
together. It is more than probable that Fletcher, the 
elder of the two, had written for the theatres before his 
acquaintance with Beaumont began ; and that in The 
Woman-Hater and in Thierry and Theodoret he had 
proved his ability both as a comic and as a tragic dra- 



BEAUMONT AND FLETCHEE. 159 

matist before Beaumont had thought of dramatic compo- 
sition. When they did meet, they found, in Aubrey's 
words, a " wonderful consimility of phansy " between 
them, which resulted in an exceeding " dearnesse of 
friendship " ; and the old antiquary adds : " They lived 
together on the Banke side, not far from the playhouse, 
both bachelors, lay together," and " had the same 
cloths and cloak" between them. Their first joint 
composition was the tragi-comedy of Philaster, pro- 
duced about the year 1608 ; and we may suppose that 
this community of goods as well as thoughts continued 
until 1613, when Beaumont was married, and that the 
friendship remained unbroken till it was broken in 1616 
by Beaumont's death. Fletcher lived until August, 
1625, at which time he was suddenly cut off by the 
plague, in his forty-sixth year. 

In regard to the question as to Beaumont's share in 
the authorship of the fifty-two plays which go under 
the name of Beaumont and Fletcher, let us first quote 
the indignant doggerel which Sir Aston Cokaine ad- 
dressed to the publisher of the first edition, in 1647 : — 

" Beaumont of those many writ in few : 
And Massinger in other few : the main 
Being sole issues of sweet Fletcher's brain. 
But how came I, jon ask, so much to know ? 
Fletcher's chief bosom-friend informed me so." 



160 BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. 

This gives no information touching the special plays 
which Beaumont assisted in producing. None of 
them were published as joint productions during his life, 
and only three during the nine or ten years that 
Fletcher survived him. Of the fifty-two dramas in the 
collection, fifty were written in the eighteen years 
which elapsed between 1607 and 1625. During the 
first years of their partnership neither seemed to be 
dependent on the stage for support ; and it is almost cer- 
tain that Beaumont's income continued to be adequate 
to his wants, and that his pen was never spurred into 
action by poverty. The result was that the earlier 
dramas were composed more slowly and carefully than 
the later. A year elapsed between the production of 
their first joint play, Philaster, in 1608, and the Maid's 
Tragedy, in 1309. In 1610 Fletcher alone brought out 
The Faithful Shepherdess. In 1611, A King and No 
King and the Knight of the Burning Pestle were acted. 
These five dramas — one exclusively by Fletcher, the 
others joint productions — - are commonly ranked as 
their best works, and are considered to include all the 
capacities of their genius. If we suppose that after 
1611 they wrote two plays a year, we have fifteen as 
the number produced up to the period of Beaumont's 
death, leaving thirty -five which were written by 
Fletcher alone in nine years. We do not think that 



BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. 161 

Beaumont's hand can be traced in more than fifteen of 
the plays, or that it is predominant in more than six. 

With individual differences as to mind and tempera- 
ment, these dramatists had some general characteristics 
in common. They agreed in being tainted with the 
fashionable slavishness and fashionable immorahty of 
the court of James. They believed in the divine right 
of kings as piously as any bishop, and they violated all 
the decencies of life as recklessly as any courtier. The 
impurity of Beaumont, however, seems the result of 
elaborate thinking, that of Fletcher the running over 
of heedless animal spirits. They agreed also in certain 
leading dramatic conceptions and types of character; 
and they agreed, in regard to the morality of their 
plays, in subordinating their consciences to their au- 
diences. But the mind of Beaumont was as slow, solid, 
and painstaking as his associate's was rapid, mercurial, 
and inventive. The tradition runs that his chief busi- 
ness was to correct the overflowings of Fletcher's fancy, 
and hold its volatile creativeness in check, Everybody 
of that age commended his judgment, and even Ben 
Jonson is said to have consulted him in regard to his 
plots. The plays in which he had a main hand exhibit 
a firmer hold upon character, a more orderly disposition 
of the incidents, and greater symmetry in the construc- 
tion, than the others. His verse is also simpler, 

K 



162 BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. 

sweeter, more voluble, than Fletcher's, with few of the 
latter's double and triple endings and harsh pauses. 
Take, for example, the passage in which Philaster re- 
counts his meeting with Bellario : — 

" Hunting the buck, 
I found him sitting by a fountain's side, 
Of which he borrowed some to quench his thirst, 
And paid the nymph again as much in tears. 
A garland lay him by, made by himself 
Of many several flowers bred in the vale, 
Stuck in that mystic order that the rareness 
Delighted me ; but ever when he turned 
His tender eyes upon 'em he would weep. 
As if he meant to make 'em grow again." 

Now contrast this with a characteristic passage from 
t'letcher : — 

" All shall be right again ; and, as a pine, 
Bent from Oeta by a sweeping tempest. 
Jointed again, and made a mast, defies 
Those raging winds that split him ; so will I 
Pieced to my never-failing strength and fortune. 
Steer through these swelling dangers, plough their prides up, 
And bear like thunder through their loudest tempests." 

Beaumont also, though his general temperament was 
not so poetical as his partner's, had a vein of poetrj 
in him, which was superior in quality and depth to 
Fletcher's, though sooner exhausted. Beaumont, we 



BEAUMONT AND FLETCHEE. 163 

think it was, who conceived that beautiful type of 
womanhood of which Bellario in Philaster, Panthea in 
A King and No King, and Viola in The Coxcomb, are 
perhaps the most exquisite embodiments, and which also 
appears, somewhat dissolved in sentimentality, in As- 
pasia in The Maid's Tragedy. It is true that Shake- 
speare had already represented this type of character 
with even more force and purity in his Viola ; but still 
Beaumont's mind appears to have penetrated to its ideal 
sources, and not to have copied from his greater con- 
temporary. Beaumont could only repeat it under other 
names, after its first embodiment in Bellario ; but it was 
too delicate and elusive for Fletcher even to repeat, and 
it never appears in the dramas he wrote after Beau- 
mont's death. Fletcher has given us many examples 
of womanly virtue, devotion, and heroism ; but he had a 
bad trick of disconnecting virtue from modesty, and the 
talk of his best and noblest women is often such as 
would scare womankind from any theatre of the present 
day. Beaumont alone could combine feminine inno- 
cence with feminine power, the most ethereal softness 
and sweetness with martyr-like heroism, knowledge of 
good with ignorance of evil, and invest the whole repre- 
sentation with a visionary charm, so that it affects us as 
Panthea did Arbaces : — 



164 BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. 

" She is not fair 
Nor beautiful ; these words express her not ; 
They say her looks have something excellent, 
That wants a name." 

Fletcher could not, we think, have written Bellario's 
account of her love for Philaster, as it runs in Beau- 
mont's limpid verse : — 

" My father oft would speak 
Your worth and virtue ; and as I did grow 
More and more apprehensive, I did thirst 
To see the man so praised. But yet all this 
Was but a maiden-longing, to be lost 
As soon as found ; tUl, sitting in my window, 
Printing my thoughts in lawn, I saw a god, 
I thought, (but it was you,) enter our gates; 
My blood flew out and back again, as fast 
As I had puffed it forth and sucked it in 
Like breath; then was I called away in haste 
To entertain you. Never was a man, 
Heaved from a sheep-cote to a sceptre, raised 
So high in thoughts as I. You left a kiss 
Upon these lips then, which I mean to keep 
From you forever ; I did hear you talk. 
Far above singing. After you were gone, 
I grew acquainted with my heart, and searched 
What stirred it so: alas, I found it love ! " 

With this superior fineness of perception, Beaumont 
also excelled his associate in solid humor. The chief 
proof of this is to be found in his delineations, in 



BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. 165 

The Knight of the Burning Pestle, of the London citi- 
zen and his wife. These have a geniality, richness, and 
raciness, a closeness to nature and to fact, unexcelled by 
any contemporary pictures of Elizabethan manners and 
character, not excepting even Ben Jonson's. A more 
extravagant, but hardly less delicious, example of Beau- 
mont's humor is his character of Bessus, in A King and 
No King, — a braggart whose cowardice is sustained by 
assurance so indomitable as to wear the aspect of cour- 
age ; one who is too base to feel insult, who cannot be 
kicked out of his chirping self-esteem, but presents as 
cheerful a countenance to infamy as to honor. 

After, however, awarding to Beaumont all that he can 
properly claim, he must still be placed below Fletcher, 
not merely in fertility, but in force and variety of genius. 
Of Fletcher, indeed, it is difficult to convey an adequate 
idea, without running into some of his own extrava- 
gance, and without quoting passages which would shock 
all modern notions of decency. He most assuredly was 
not a great man nor a great poet. He lacked serious- 
ness, depth, purpose, principle, imaginative closeness of 
conception, imaginative condensation of expression. He 
saw everything at one remove from its soul and essence, 
and must be ranked with poets of the second class. 
But no other poet ever had such furious animal spirits, 
a keener sense of enjoyment, a more perfect abandon* 



166 BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. 

ment to whatever was uppermost in his mind at the mo- 
ment. There w^as no conscience in his rakish and disso- 
lute nature. Nothing in him — wit, humor, fancy, appe- 
tite, sentiment, passion, knowledge of life, knowledge of 
books, all his good and all his bad thoughts — met any 
impediment of taste or principle when rushing into ex- 
pression. His eyes flash, his cheeks glow, as he writes ; 
his air is hurried and eager ; the blood that tingles and 
throbs in his veins flushes his words ; and will and judg- 
ment, taken captive, follow with reluctant steps and half- 
averted faces the perilous lead of the passions they 
should direct. As there was no reserve in him, there 
was no- reserved power. Rich as were the elements 
of his nature, they were never thoroughly organized in 
intellectual character ; and as no presiding personality 
regulated the activity of his mind, he seems hardly to 
be morally responsible for the excesses into which he 
was impelled. Composition, indeed, sets his brain in a 
whirl. He sometimes writes as if inspired by a satyr ; 
he sometimes writes as if inspired by a seraph ; but 
neither satyr nor seraph had any hold on his individual- 
ity, and neither could put fetters on his caprice. There 
is the same gusto in his indecencies as iiv his refine- 
ments. Though an Englishman, lie has no morality, 
except that morality which is connected with generous 
instincts, or which is awakened by th© sense of beauty. 



BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. 167 

Though the son of a bishop, he had no religion, except 
ihat religion which consists in an alternate worship of 
Venus, Bacchus, and Mars. An incurable mental and 
moral levity is the characteristic of his writings, — a 
levity which has its source in an intoxication of the 
soul through an excess of feeling and sensation, and 
which is moral or immoral, sentimental or sensual, ac- 
cording to the impulse or temptation of the moment. 

This giddiness of soul, in which decorum is ignored 
rather than denied, is most brilliantly and buoyantly 
exhibited in his comedies. In The Chances, The Span- 
ish Curate, The Custom of the Country, Rule a Wife 
and have a Wife, The Wild- Goose Chase, and especially 
in Monsieur Thomas and The Little French Lawyer, 
we see the comic muse emancipated from all restraint, 
— loose, free-spoken, sportive, sparkling, indeed almost 
madly merry. It is not so much any quotable speci- 
mens of wit and humor as it is the all-animating spirit 
of frolic and mischief, which gives to these comedies 
their droll, equivocal power to please. In Fletcher's 
serious plays the same levity is displayed in pushing 
sentiment and passion altogether beyond the bounds of 
character ; and the volatile fancy which, in his comedy, 
riots in fun, in his tragedy riots in blood. What lifts 
botli into a poetic region is the tone of romantic heroism 
by which they are almost equally characterized. His 



168 BEAUMONT AND FLETCHEE. 

coxcombs and profligates, as well as his conquerors and 
heroes, are all intrepid. They do not rate their lives at 
a pin's fee, — the first in comparison with the gratifica- 
tion of a passing desire or caprice ; the second, in com- 
parison with glory and honor. The peculiar life, in- 
deed, of Fletcher's characters consists in their being 
careless of life. Wholly absorbed in the feeling or 
object of the instant, their action is ecstatic action, and 
flashes on us in a succession of poetic surprises. This 
is the great charm of Fletcher's plays ; this gilds their 
grossness, and has kept them alive. You find it in his 
Monsieur Thomas as well as in his delineation of Caesar. 
All the comic characters profess a sportive contempt for 
consequences, and startle us with unexpected audacities. 
Fear of disease, danger, or death never dissuades them 
from the rollicking action or expression of eccentricity 
and vice. Their concern is only for the free, wild, reck- 
less whim of the moment. Thus, in the play of The 
Sea Voyage, Julietta, enraged at the jeers of Tibalt and 
the master of the ship, exclaims : — 

" Why, slaves, 't is in our power to hang ye ! " 

" Very likely," retorts the jovial Master, — 

" 'T is in our powers then to be hanged, and scorn ye ! " 

This heroism of the blood, when it passes from an 



BEAUMONT AND FLETCHEE. 169 

instinct into some semblance of a 23rinci]3le, adopts the 
chivalrous guise of honor. Honor, in Fletcher's ethical 
code, is the only possible and admissible restraint on 
appetite and passion. Thus in the drama of The Cap- 
tain, Julio, infatuated with the wicked Lelia, thinks of 
marrying her, and confesses to his friend Angelo that 
her bewitching and bewildering beauty has entirely 
mastered him. "When she speaks, he says : — 

" Then music 
( Such as old Oipheus made, that gave a soul 
To aged mountains, and made rugged beasts 
Lay by their rages ; and tall trees, that knew 
No sound but tempests, to bow down their branches, 
And hear, and wonder ; and the sea, whose surges 
Shook their white heads in heaven, to be as midnight 
Still and attentive) steals into our souls 
So suddenly and strangely, that we are 
From that time no more ours, but what she pleases ! " 

Angelo admits the temptation, says he would be will- 
ing himself to sacrifice all his possessions, even his soul, 
to obtain her, but then adds : — 

" Yet methinks we should not dole away 
That that is something more than ours, our honors ; 
I would not have thee marry her by no means." 

Again : Curio, in Love's Cure, when threatened by 
his mistress with the loss of her affection if he fights 
with her brother, replies that he would willingly give 
8 



170 BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. 

his life, " rip every vein," to please her, yet still insists 
on his purpose. 

" Life is but a word, a shadow, a melting dream, 
Compared with essential and eternal honor." 

In the plays of The Mad Lover, The Loyal Subject, 
Bonduca, and The False One, Fletcher attempts to por- 
tray this heroic element, not as a mere flash of cour- 
ageous inspiration, but as a solid element of character. 
He strains his mind to the utmost, but the strain is too 
apparent. There is no calm, strong grasp of the theme. 
His heroes are generally too fond of vaunting them- 
selves, too declamatory, too screechy, too much like 
embodied speeches. In his own words, they carry " a 
drum in their mouths " ; and what they say of them- 
selves would more properly and naturally come from 
others. Thus Memnon, in The Mad Lover, tells his 
prince, in apology for his roughness of behavior : — 

" I know no court but martial. 
No oily language but the shock of arms, 
No dalliance but with death, no lofty measures 
But weary and sad marches, cold and hunger, 
'Larums at midnight Valor's self would shake at 5 
Yet I ne'er shrunk. Balls of consuming wildfire, 
That licked men up like lightning, have I laughed at, 
And tossed 'em back again, like children's trifles. 
Upon the edges of my enemies' swords 
I have marched like whirlwinds, Fury at this hand waiting, 



BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. 171 

Death at my right, Fortune my forlorn hope : 
When I have grappled with Destruction, 
And tugged with pale-faced Ruin, Night and Mischief 
Frighted to see a new day break in blood." 

This is talk on stilts ; but it is still resounding talk, 
full of ardor and the impatient consciousness of personal 
prowess. In the characterization of Coesar in The 
False One, the same feeling of individual supremacy 
is combined with a haughtier self-possession, as befits 
a mightier and more imperial soul. We feel, through- 
out this play, that there is power in the mere presence 
of Caesar, and that his words derive their force from his 
character. The very minds and hearts of the Egyp- 
tians crouch before him. He sways by disdaining them ; 
even his clemency is allied to scorn. " You have 
found," he says, — 

" You have found me merciful in arguing with ye ; 
Swords, hungers, fires, destruction of all natures, 
Demoiishment of kingdoms, and whole ruins, 
Are wont to be my orators." 

When they bring him the head of Pompey, whom 
they have slain for the purpose of propitiating him, his 
contempt for them breaks out in a noble tribute to his 
great enemy. 

" Egyptians, dare ye think your highest pyramids, 
Built to out-dure the sun, as you suppose, 



172 BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. 

Where your unwortliy kings lie raked in ashes, 
Are monuments fit for him ? No, brood of Nilus, 
Nothing can cover his high fame but heaven, 
No pyramids set off his memories, 
But the eternal substance of his greatness ; 
To which I leave him." 

When he is besieged in the palace by the whole 
Egyptian army, he prepares, with his few followers, to 
cut his way to his ships. Septimius, a wretch who has 
been false to all parties, offers to show him safe means 
both of vengeance and escape. Caesar's reply is one 
of the finest things in Fletcher. 

" Caesar scorns 
To find his safety or revenge his wrongs 
So base a way, or owe the means of life 
To such a leprous traitor! I have towered 
For victory like a falcon in the clouds, 
Not digged for 't like a mole. Our swords and cause 
Make way for us : and that it may appear 
We took a noble course, and hate base treason, 
Some soldiers that would merit Csesar's favor 
Hang him on yonder turret, and then follow 
The lane this sword makes for you." 

But perhaps the play in which the heroic and martial 
spirit is most dominant is the tragedy of Bonduca ; and 
the address of Suetonius, the Roman general, to his 
troops, as they prepare to close in battle with the Brit- 
ons, is in Fletcher's noblest vein of manliness and imagi- 
nation. 



BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 173 

" And, gentlemen, to you now: 
To bid you fight is needless; ye are Eomans, 
The name will fight itself. 

Go on in full assurance : draw your swords 
As daring and as confident as justice ; 
The gods of Eome fight for ye ; loud Fame calls ye, 
^ Pitched on the topless Apennine, and blows 
To all the under- world, all nations, the seas, 
And unfrequented deserts where the snow dwells | 
Wakens the ruined monuments ; and there, 
Where nothing but eternal death and sleep is. 
Informs again the dead bones with your virtues. 
Go on, I say ; valiant and wise rule heaven, 
And all the great aspects attend 'em. Do but blow 
Upon this enemy, who, but that we want foes, 
Cannot deserve that name ; and like a mist, 
A lazy fog, before your burning valors 
You '11 find him fly to nothing. This is all. 
We have swords, and are the sons of ancient Eomans, 
Heirs to their endless valors: fight and conquer! " 

The maxim here laid down, that " Valiant and wise 
rule heaven," is much better, or worse, than Napoleon's, 
that " Providence is always on the side of the heaviest 
battalions." 

It might be supposed that the extreme susceptibility of 
Fletcher — the openness of his nature to all impressions, 
ludicrous, romantic, heroic, or indecent — would have 
made him a great delineator of the varieties of life and 
character. But the truth is, it made him versatile with* 



174 BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. 

out making him universal. He wrote a greater num- 
ber of plays than Shakespeare, and he has between five 
and six hundred names of characters ; but two or three 
plays of Shakespeare cover a wider extent of human 
life than all of Fletcher's. To compare them is like 
comparing a planet with a comet, — a comet whose 
nucleus is only a few hundred miles in diameter, though 
its nebulous appendage flames millions of leagues be- 
hind. Fletcher's susceptibility to the surfaces of things 
was almost unlimited ; his vital sympathy and inward 
vision were confined to a few kinds of character and a 
few aspects of life. His variety is not variety of char- 
acter, but variety of incident and circumstance. He 
contrives rather than creates ; and his contrivances, 
ingenious and exhilarating as they are, cannot hide his 
constant repetition of a few types of human nature. 
These types he conceived by a process essentially differ- 
ent from Shakespeare's. Shakespeare individualized 
classes ; Fletcher generalized individuals. One of 
Shakespeare's characters includes a whole body of per- 
sons ; one of Fletcher's is simply an idealized individ- 
ual, and that often an exceptional individual. This 
individual, repeated in play after play, never covers so 
large a portion of humanity as Shakespeare's individual- 
ized class, which he disdains to repeat. But, more than 
this, the very faculties of Fletcher, — his wit, humor, 



BEAUMONT AND FLETCHEE. 175 

understanding, fancy, imagination, — though we call 
them by the same words we use in naming Shake- 
speare's, differ from Shakespeare's both in kind and 
degree. Shakespeare was a great and comprehensive 
man, whose faculties all partook of his general greatness. 
The man Fletcher was so much smaller and narrower, 
and the materials on which his faculties worked so much 
more limited, that we are fooled by words if, following 
the example of his contemporaries, we place any one 
of his qualities or faculties above or on a level with 
Shakespeare's. 

Keeping, then, in view the fact that the man is the 
measure of the poet, let us glance for a moment at 
Fletcher's poetic faculty as distinguished from his dra- 
matic. 

As a poet he is best judged, perhaps, by his pastoral 
tragi-comedy of The Faithful Shepherdess, the most 
elaborate and one of the earliest of his works. It 
failed on the stage, being, in his own phrase, " hissed to 
ashes " ; but the merits which the many-headed mon- 
ster of the pit could not discern so enchanted Milton 
that they were vividly in his memory when he wrote 
Comus. The melody, the romantic sweetness of fan- 
cy, the luxuriant and luxurious descriptions of nature, 
and the true lyric inspiration, of large portions of this 
drama, are not more striking than the deliberate desecra- 



176 BEAUMONT AND FLETCHEE. 

tion of its beauty by the introduction of impure senti- 
ments and images. The hoof-prints of unclean beasts 
are visible all over Fletcher's pastoral paradise ; and 
they are there by design. Why they are there is a 
question which can be answered only by pointing out 
the primal defect of Fletcher's mind, which was an 
incapacity to conceive or represent goodness and inno- 
cence except as the ideal opposites of evil and depravity. 
He took depravity as the positive fact of life, and then 
framed from fancy a kind of goodness out of its nega- 
tion. The result is, that, in the case of The Faithful 
Shepherdess, Chloe and the Sullen Shepherd, the de- 
praved characters of the play, are the most natural and 
lifelike, while there is a sickliness and unreality in the 
very virtue of Amoret. It is not, therefore, as some 
critics suppose, the mere admission of vicious charac- 
ters into the play that gives it its taint. Milton, whose 
conceptions both of good and evil were positive, and who 
represented them in their right spiritual relations, en' 
tirely avoided this error in Comus, while he availed 
himself of much in The Faithful Shepherdess that is 
excellent. In Comus it is virtue which seems most real 
and permanent, and the vice and wickedness represented 
in it do not mar the general impression of moral beauty 
left by the whole poem. But Fletcher, having no posi- 
tive imaginative conception of the good, and feeling for 



BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. 177 

<f3pravity neither mental nor moral disgust, reverses 
this order. His vice is robust and prominent ; his vir- 
tue is vague, characterless, and fantastic ; and though his 
play has a formal moral, it has an essential impurity. 
But, if the general effect of the pastoral is not beauti- 
ful, none can deny its beauty in parts, especially in the 
lyrical portions. What Milton condescended to copy 
everybody must be delighted to applaud. But not 
merely in The Faithful Shepherdess is this lyric genius 
displayed. Scattered all over his plays are exquisite 
songs and short poems, representing almost every vari- 
ety of the poet's mood, and each perfect of its kind. 
As an example of the softness, sweetness, and melody 
of these we will quote the hymn to Venus from The 
Mad Lover : — 

" divinest star of heaven, 

Thou, in power above the seven ; 

Thou, sweet kindler of desu-es, 

Till they grow to mutual fii'es ; 

Thou, gentle queen, that art 

Curer of each wounded heart ; 

Thou, the fuel and the flame ; 

Thou, in heaven, here, the same ; 

Thou, the wooer and the wooed; 

Thou, the hunger and the food ; 

Thou, the prayer and the prayed ; 

Thou, what is or shall be said; 

Thou, stiU young and golden tressed, 

Make me by thy answer blessdd ! " 

8* I. 



178 MASSINGER. 

Fletcher died in 1625, and the dramatist who sue 
ceeded him in popular esteem was a less fiery and 
ebullient spirit, Philip Mas singer. Massinger, the 
son of a gentleman in the service of the Earl of Pem- 
broke, was born in 1584, was educated at Oxford, left 
the University without taking a degree, and about the 
year 1606 went to London to seek his fortune as a 
dramatist. Here he worked obscurely for some sixteen 
years ; the only thing we know about him being this, 
that in 1614, in connection with Field and Daborne, he 
was a suppliant to old Manager Henslowe for five 
pounds to relieve him and them from the most pinching 
pecuniary distress. In 1622 The Virgin Martyr, a play 
written in connection with Dekkar, was published, and 
from this period to his death, in 1640, his most cele- 
brated dramas were produced. He wrote thirty-seven 
plays, twenty of which have perished. Eleven of them, 
in manuscript, were in the possession of a Mr. Warbur- 
ton, whose cook, desirous of saving what she considered 
better paper, used them in the kindling of fires and the 
basting of turkeys, and would doubtless have treated 
the manuscript of the Faery Queene and the Novum 
Organum in the same way had Providence seen fit to 
commit them to her master's custody. 

Massinger's life seems to have been one long struggle 
with want. The price for a play in his time ranged 



MASSINGER. 179 

from ten to twenty pounds ; if published, the copyright 
brought from six to ten pounds more ; and the dedication 
fee was forty shilHngs. The income of a successful dram- 
atist, who wrote two or three plays a year, was about 
fifty pounds, equivalent to some twelve hundred dollars 
at the present time. But it is doi^tful if even Fletcher 
could count on so large an income as this, as some of 
his plays failed in representation, great master of the- 
atrical effect as he undoubtedly was. Massinger was 
always poor, and, by his own admission in one of his 
dedications, depended at times on the casual charity of 
patrons. When poverty was not present, it seems to 
have been always in prospect. He had a morbid vision 
of approaching calamities, as — 

" Creeping billows 

Not got to shore yet." 

It is difficult to determine how far his popular principles 
in politics interfered with his success at the theatre. 
Fletcher's slavish poHtical doctrines were perfectly 
suited to the court of James and Charles. We are, 
says one of his characters, — 



" We are but subjects, Maximus. Obedience 
To what is done, and grief for what is ill done, 
Is all we can call ours." 

Massmger, on the contrary, was as strong a Liberal 



180 MASSINGER. 

as Hampden or Pym. The political and social abuses 
of his time found in him an uncompromising satirist. 
Oppression in every form, whether of the poor by the 
rich, or the subject by the king, provoked his amiable 
nature into unwonted passion. In his plays he fre- 
quently violates the keeping of character in order to in- 
trude his own manly political sentiments and ideas. 
There are allusions in his dramas which, if they were 
taken by the audience, must have raised a storm of min- 
gled applause and hisses. Though more liberty seems 
to have been allowed to playwrights than to members 
of Parliament, Massinger sometimes found it difficult to 
get his plays licensed. In 1631 the Master of the 
Revels refused to license one of his pieces, on the 
ground that it contained " dangerous matter " ; and 
the dramatist had to pay the fee, while he lost all the 
results of his labor. In 1638, in the height of the dis- 
pute about ship-money, he wrote a drama, now lost, 
called The King and the Subject. On looking it over, 
the Master of the Revels was startled at coming upon 
the following passage : — 

" Moneys ? we '11 raise supplies which way we please, 
And force you to subscribe to blanks, in which 
We '11 mulct you as we shall think fit. The Csesars 
In Rome were wise, acknowledging no laws 
But what their swords did ratify ; the wives 
And daughters of the senators bowing to 
Their wills as deities." 



MASSINGER. ^ 181 

The play was shown to King Charles, and he, mark- 
ing the obnoxious passage, wrote with his own hand : 
" This is too insolent, and to be changed." It is, how- 
ever, to be mentioned to his honor, that he allowed the 
piece to be acted after the daring lines had been ex- 
punged. 

Massinger's spirit, though sufficiently independent and 
self-respectful, was as modest as Addison's. He chid 
his friends when they placed him as a dramatist by the 
side of Beaumont and Fletcher. All the commendatory 
poems prefixed to his plays evince affection for the man 
as well as admiration for the genius. But there is a 
strange absence of distinct memorials of his career ; and 
his death and burial were in harmony with the loneli- 
ness of his life. We are told that, on the 16 th of March, 
1640, he went to bed, seemingly in good health, and was 
found dead in the morning. In the parish register of the 
Church of St. Saviour's, nnder the date of March 20, we 
read : " Buried, Philip Massinger, a stranger." No 
stone indicates where in the churchyard he was laid. 
" His sepulchre," says Hartley Coleridge, " was like 
his life, obscure ; like the nightingale he sung darkling, 
— it is to be feared like the nightingale of the fable, 
with his breast against a thorn." 

Massinger possessed a large though not especially 
poetic mind, and a temperament equable rather than 



182 MASSINGER. 

energetic. He lacked strong passions, vivid conceptions,, 
creative imagination. In reading him we feel that the 
exulting, vigorous life of the drama of the age has 
begun to decay. But though he has been excelled by 
obscurer writers in special qualities of genius, he still 
attaches us by the harmony of his powers, and the uni- 
formity of his excellence. The plot, style, and char- 
acters of one of his dramas all conduce to a common 
interest. His plays, indeed, are novels in dialogue. 
They rarely thrill, startle, or kindle us, but, as Lamb 
says, " are read with composure and placid delight." 
The Bondman, The Picture, The Bashful Lover, The 
Renegado, A Very Woman, The Emperor of the East, 
interest us specially as stories. The Duke of Milan, 
The Unnatural Combat, and The Fatal Dowry are his 
nearest approaches to the representation of passion, as 
distinguished from its description. The leading charac- 
ters in The City Madam and A New Way to pay Old 
Debts are delineated with more than common power, 
for they are embodiments of the author's hatred as 
well as of his genius. Massinger's life was such as to 
make him look with little favor on the creditor portion of 
the British people ; and when creditors were also op- 
pressors, he was roused to a pitch of indignation which in- 
spired his conceptions of Luke and Sir Giles Overreach. 
Massinger's style, though it does not evince a single 



MASSINGER. 18B 

great quality of the poet, has always charmed English 
readers by its dignity, flexibility, elegance, clearness, 
and ease. His metre and rhythm Coleridge pronounces 
incomparably good. Still his verse, with all its merits, 
is smooth rather than melodious ; the thoughts are not 
born in music, but mechanically set to a tune ; and even 
its majestic flow is frequently purchased at the expense 
of dramatic closeness to character and passion. 

Though there is nothing in Massinger's plays, as 
there is in Fletcher's, indicating profligacy of mind and 
morals, they are even coarser in scenes ; for as Massin- 
ger had none of Fletcher's wit and humor, he made his 
low and inferior characters, whether men or women, 
little better than beasts. As even his serious personages 
use words and allusions which are now banished from 
all respectable books, we must suppose that decorum, as 
we understand it, was almost unknown in the time of 
James and Charles. Thus The Guardian, one of the 
most mellifluous in diction and licentious in incident of 
all Massinger's works, was acted at the court of Charles 
I., and acted, too, by order of the king, on Sunday, 
January 12, 1633. This coarseness is a deplorable blot 
on Massinger's plays ; but that it is to be referred to the 
manners of his time, and not to his own immorality, 
is proved by the fact that his vital sympathies were 
for virtue and justice, and that his genius never dis- 



184 MASSINGER. 

played itself in his representations of coarse depravity. 
As a man he seems to have had not merely elevated 
sentiments, but strong religious feelings. If his unim- 
passioned spirit ever rose to fervor, the fervor was 
moral ; his best things are ethically, as well as poetically 
the best ; and in reading him we often find passages 
like the following, which leap up from the prosaic level 
of his diction as by an impulse of ecstasy : — 

" When good men pursue 
The path marked out by virtue, the blest samts 
With joy look on it, and seraphic angels 
Clap their celestial wings in heavenly plaudits.'* 

"■ Honor is 
Virtue's allowed ascent ; honor, that clasps 
All perfect justice in her arms, that craves 
No more respect than what she gives, that does 
Nothing but what she '11 suffer." 

" As you have 
A soul moulded from heaven, and do desire 
To have it made a star there, make the means 
Of your, ascent to that celestial height 
Virtue winged with brave action : they draw near 
The nature and the essence of the gods 
Who imitate their goodness." 

" By these blessed feet 
That pace the paths of equity, and tread boldly 
On the stiff neck of tyramious oppression, 



FOKD. 185 

By these tears by which I bathe them, I conjure you 
With pity to look on me." 

We now come to a very different dramatist, John 
Ford, whose genius and personal appearance are 
shrewdly indicated in a rugged couplet from a contem- 
porary satire : — 

" Deep in a dump, John Ford by himself sat, 
With folded arms and melancholy hat." 

In that somewhat dainty mental loneliness, and under 
that melancholy hat, the mind of the poet was absorbed 
in the intensest meditation of the ideal possibilities of 
grief and guilt, and the strange aberrations of the pas- 
sions. Massinger has little sway over the heart ; but 
Ford was not merely the poet of the heart, but of the 
broken heart, — the heart bending under burdens, or 
torn by emotions, almost too great for mortality to bear. 
In reading his tragedies, as in reading Webster's, we are 
fretfully conscious of being shut up in the sultry atmos- 
phere of one morbid mind, deprived of all companion- 
ship with healthy nature and genial human life, and 
forced into a shuddering or sickly sympathy with the 
extremes of crime and suffering. But the power of 
Webster lies in terror ; the power of Ford, in tender- 
ness- Out of his peculiar walk, Ford is the feeblest of 
finical fine writers. His attempts at liveliness and 



186 FOED. 

humor excite, not laughter, but rather a dismal feeling 
of pitying contempt. His great gift is displayed in 
the tragedy of The Broken Heart, and in two or 
tliree thrilling scenes of the tragedy of Love's Sacri- 
fice. In The Broken Heart, the noblest of his works, 
our sympathies are on the whole rightly directed ; and 
the death of Calantha, after enduring the most soul- 
crushing calamities, concealed from others under a show 
of mirth, is exquisitely pathetic : — 

" my lords, 
I but deceived your eyes with antick gesture, 
When one news straiglit came huddling on another. 
Of death, and death, and death, still I danced forward ; 
But it struck home, and here, and in an instant. 

They are the silent griefs which cut the heartstrings ; 
Let me die smiling." 

Of another of Ford's tragedies; which can hardly 
be named here, Campbell justly remarks : " Better that 
poetry should cease to exist than have to do with such 
subjects." But it is characteristic of Ford, that his 
power and tenderness are seldom so great as in their 
worst perversions. "Without any austerity of soul, dis- 
eased in his sympathies, a sentimentalist rather than a 
man of sentiment, he brooded over guilt until all sense 
of its wickedness was lost in a morbid pity for its afflic- 



FORD. 187 

tions, and the tears he compels us to shed are rarely the 
tears of honest and manly feeling. 

Ford died, or disappeared, about the year 1640, and 
with him died the last original dramatist of the Eliza- 
bethan age ; for Shirley, though his plays fill six thick 
volumes, was but a faint echo of Fletcher. Thus, in 
a short period of fifty years, from 1590 to 1640, we 
have the names of thirteen dramatists, varying in power 
and variety of power and perversion of power, but each 
individual in his genius, and one the greatest genius of 
the world, — the names of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben 
Jonson, Heywood, Middleton, Marston, Dekkar, Web- 
ster, Chapman, Beaumont, Fletcher, Massinger, and 
Ford. Though little is known of their lives, it is 
through them we leafn the life of their time, — the 
manners, customs, character, ideas, habits, sentiments, 
and passions, the form and the spirit, of the Elizabethan 
age. And they are all intensely and audaciously human. 
Taking them in the mass, they have much to ofiend our 
artistic and shock our moral sense; but still the dra- 
matic literature of the world would be searched in vain 
for another instance of so broad and bold a representa- 
tion of the varieties of human nature, — one in which 
the conventional restraints both on depravity and excel- 
lence are so resolutely set aside, — one in which the 
many-charactered soul of man is so vividly depicted, in 



188 FOKD. 

its weakness and in its strength, in its mirth and in its 
passion, in the appetites which sink it below the beasts 
that perish, in the aspirations which hft it to regions 
of existence of which the visible heavens are but the 
veil. 



r 



SPENSEE. 

"TN the last chapter we closed our remarks on the 
Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth. In 
the present we propose to treat of Spenser, with some 
introductory observations on the miscellaneous poets 
who preceded him. And it is necessary to bear in mind 
that, in the age of which we treat, as in all ages, the 
versifiers far exceeded the seers, and the poetasters the 
poets. It has been common to exercise a charity to- 
wards the early English poets which we refuse to extend 
to those of later times ; but mediocrity has identical 
characteristics in all periods, and there was no charm 
in the circumstances of the Elizabethan age to convert 
a rhymer into a genius. Indeed, leaving out the drama- 
tists, the poetry produced in the reigns of Elizabeth 
and James can hardly compare in originality, richness, 
and variety, with the English poetry of the nineteenth 
century. Spenser is a great name ; but he is the only 
undramatic poet of his time who could be placed above, 
or on a level with, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Cole- 
ridge, or Tennyson. There is a list, somewhere, of two 
hundred names of poets who belonged to the Eliza- 



190 SPENSEE. 

bethan age, — mostly mere nebulous appearances, which 
it requires a telescope of the greatest power to resolve 
into individual stars. Few of them can be made to 
shine with as steady a lustre as the ordinary versemen 
who contribute to our magazines. Take England's 
Helicon and the Paradise of Dainty Devices, — two 
collections of the miscellaneous poetry written during 
the last forty or fifty years of the sixteenth century, 
— and, if we except a few pieces by Baleigh, Sidney, 
Marlowe, Greene, Lodge, Breton, Watson, Nash, and 
Hunnis, these collections have little to dazzle us into 
admiration or afflict us with a sense of inferiority. 
Reading them is a task, in which an occasional elegance 
of thought, or quaintness of fancy, or sweetness of sen- 
tinrenTHoes not compensate for the languor induced 
by tiresome repetitions of moral commonplaces, varied 
by repetitions, as tiresome, of amatory commonplaces. 
In the great body of the poetry of the time there is 
more that is bad than tolerable, more that is tolerable 
than readable, and more that is readable than excellent. 
One person, however, stands out from this mob of 
versifiers the most noticeable elevation in English po- 
etry from Chaucer to Spenser, namely, Thomas Sack- 
ville, afterwards Lord Buckhurst, and, still later. Earl 
of Dorset. Born in 1536, and educated at both univer- 
sities, his poetic genius was but one phase of his general 



SPENSER. 191 

ability. In 1561 his tragedy of Gorboduc was acted 
with great applause before the Queen. Previously to 
this, in 1559, at the age of twenty- three, he had joined 
two dreary poetasters — Baldwyne and Ferrers — in the 
production of a w^ork called The Mirrour for Magis- 
trates, the design of which was to exhibit, in a series 
of metrical narratives and soliloquies, the calamities of 
men prominent in the history of England. The work 
passed to a third edition in 1571, and received such 
constant additions from other writers, in the fourth, fifth, 
and sixth editions, that its bulk finally became enor- 
mous. Its poetical value is altogether in the compar- 
atively meagre contributions of Sackville, consisting of 
the Induction, and the complaint of the Duke of Buck- 
ingham. The Induction, especially, is a masterpiece 
of meditative imagination, working under the impulse 
of sternly serious sentiment. Misery and sorrow seem 
the dark inspirers of Sackville's Muse ; and his alle- 
goric pictures of Revenge, Remorse, Old Age, Dread, 
Care, Sleep, Famine, Strife, War, and Death exhibit 
such a combination of reflq^tive and analytic with im- 
aginative power, of melody of verse with compact, mas- 
sive strength and certainty of verbal expression, that 
our wonder is awakened that a man with such a con- 
scious mastery of the resources of thought and language 
should have written so little. If political ambition — » 



192 SPENSER. 

the ambition that puts thoughts into facts instead of 
putting them into words — was the cause of his with- 
drawal from the Muse, — if Burleigh tempted him from 
Dante, — it must be admitted that his choice, in a worldly 
sense, was justified by the event, for he became an emi- 
nent statesman, and in 1598 was made Lord High 
Treasurer of England. He held that great office at the 
time of his death, in 1608. But it is probable that 
Sackville ceased to cultivate poetry because he failed 
to reap its internal rewards. His genius had no joy in 
it, and its exercise probably gave him little poetic 
delight. With great force of imagination, his was still 
a somewhat dogged force. He could discern clearly, 
and shape truly, but no sudden ecstasy of emotion gave 
a " precious seeing " to his eye or unexpected felicity 
to his hand. There is something bleak in his noblest 
verse. The poet, we must ever remember, is paid, not 
by external praise, or fortune, or fame, but by the deep 
bliss of those inward moods from which his creations 
spring. The pleasure they give to others is as nothing 
compared with the rapture they give to him. 

But Sackville was to be succeeded by a man who, 
though he did not exhibit at so early an age equal 
power of shaping imagination, had that perception of 
the loveliness of things, and that joy in the perception, 
which make continuous poetic creation a necessity of 



SPENSER. 193 



existence. . In the meagre memorials of the external 
career of this man, Edmund Spenser, there is little 
that stands in intelligible connection with the wondrous 
inner life embodied in the enchantments of The Faery 
Queene. He was born in London in 1552, and was 
the son -of parents who, though in humble circum- 
stances, were of gentle birth. "We first hear of him, 
at the age of seventeen, as a sizar, or charity student, 
in Pembroke Hall, Cambridge. While there he made 
acquaintance and formed a lasting friendship with Ga- 
briel Harvey, -^ a man of large acquirements, irritable 
temper, and pedantic taste, who rendered himself the 
object of the sarcastic invectives of the wits of the 
time, and to be associated with whom was to run the 
risk of sharing the ridicule he provoked. One of the 
most beautiful traits of Spenser's character was his con- 
stancy to his friends; to their persons when alive, to 
their memory when dead. It is difficult to discover 
what intellectual benefits Spenser derived from Har- 
vey's companionship, though we know what the world 
has gained by his refusal to follow his advice. It was 
Harvey who tried to persuade Spenser into writing 
hexameter verse, and dissuade him from writing the 
Faery Queene. After seven years' residence at the 
university, Spenser took his degree, and went to reside 
with some friends of his family in the North of Eng- 
9 |i 



194 SPENSEE. 

land. Here he fell in love with a beautiful girl, whose 
real name he has concealed under the anagrammatic 
one of Rosalind, and who, after having tempted and 
balked the curiosity of English critics, has, by an Amer- 
ican writer,"* who has raised guessing into a science, 
been satisfactorily proved to be Rose Daniel, a sister 
of the poet Daniel. It is mortifying to record that she 
rejected the great exalter of her sex, — the creator of 
some of the most exquisite embodiments of female ex- 
cellence, — the man who had the high honor of saying 
of women, 

" For demigods they be, and first did spring 
From heaven, though graft in fraihiess feminine," 

— she rejected him, we say, for a ridiculous and irascible 
pedant, John Florio, and one so prominent in his folly 
that Shakespeare condescended to lampoon him in 
Love's Labor Lost. 

But the graces of soul and person which had no effect 
on the heart of Rosalind were not lost on the mind of 
Sir Philip Sidney. Introduced to Spenser, — it is sup- 
posed by Gabriel Harvey, — Sidney recognized his 
genius, and warmly recommended him to his uncle, the 
Earl of Leicester, who, in 1579, took him into his ser- 
vice. In December of that year he published his 

* In the Atlantic Monthly for November, 1858. 



SPENSER. 195 

Shepherd's Calendar, a series of twelve pastorals, — 
one for every month. In these, avoiding the affectation 
of refinement, he falls into the opposite affectation of 
rusticity ; and, by a profusion of obsolete and uncouth 
expressions, hinders the free movement of his fancy. 
It may be absurd for shepherds to talk in the style of 
courtiers, as they do in many pastoral poets ; but it i&. 
also absurd to give them the sentiments and ideas of 
priests and philosophers. Campbell, who is a sceptic 
in regard to all English pastorals, is especially severe on 
the Shepherd's Calendar. Spenser's shepherds, he 
says, " are parsons in disguise, who converse about 
heathen divinities and points of Christian theology. 
Palinode defends the luxuries of the Catholic clergy, 
and Piers extols the purity of Archbishop Grindal, con- 
cluding with the story of a fox who came to the house 
of a goat in the character of a pedler, and obtained ad- 
mittance by pretending to be a sheep. This may be 
burlesquing ^sop, but certainly it is not imitating 
Theocritus.'* These eclogues are, however, important, 
considered in reference to their position in the history of 
Enghsh poetry, and to their connection with the history 
of the poet's heart. No descriptions of external nature 
since Chaucer's had equalled those in the Shepherd's 
Calendar in the combination of various excellences, 
though the excellences were still second-rate, exhibiting 



196 SPENSER. 

the beautiful genius of the author struggling with the 
pedantries and aflFectations of his time, and the pedantries 
and affectations which overlaid his own mind. Even in 
his prime, it was difficult for him to grasp a thing in it- 
self, after the manner of the greatest poets, and flash its 
form and spirit upon the mind in a few vivid words, 
vital with suggestive meaning. In the Shepherd's Cal- 
endar this defect is especially prominent, his imagina- 
tion playing round objects, illustrating and adorning 
them, rather than penetrating at once to their essence. 
Even in those portions where, as Colin Clout, he cele- 
brates the beauty and bewails the coldness of Rosalind, 
we have a conventional discourse about love, rather than 
the direct utterance of the passion. 

Spenser's ambition was to obtain some office which, 
by placing him above want, would enable him to follow 
his true vocation of poet, and he seems to have looked 
to Leicester as a magnificent patron through whom his 
wish could be realized. The great design of the Faery 
Queene had already dawned upon his mind ; he 

" By that vision splendid 
Was on his way attended " ; 

and he ached for leisure and competence to enable him 
to embody his gorgeous and noble dreams. All that 
Leicester did for him was to g^t him appointed secretary 



SPENSER. 197 

to Lord Grey of Wilton, who, in 1580, went over to 
Ireland as lord deputy. Here he passed the largest 
remaining portion of his life ; and, though moaning over 
the hard fortune which banished him from England, he 
appears to have exhibited sufficient talent for affairs, and 
to have performed services of sufficient note, to deserve 
the attention of the government. In 1586 he received 
a grant of three thousand and twenty-eight acres of 
land, — a portion of the confiscated estates of the Earl 
of Desmond. The manor and the castle of Kilcolman, 
situated amidst the most beautiful scenery, constituted a 
portion of this grant. In 1589 the restless and chiv- 
alrous Raleigh, transiently out of favor with the haughty 
coquette who ruled England, came over to Ireland for 
the purpose of looking after his own immense estates in 
that country, wrung, like Spenser's, from the native pro- 
prietors. He visited the lone poet at Kilcolman ; and 

to him, 

" Amongst the coolly shade 
Of the green alders by the Mullaes shore," 

Spenser read the first three books of The Faery 
Queene. Campbell finely says : " When we conceive 
Spenser reciting his compositions to Raleigh in a scene 
so beautifully appropriate, the mind casts pleasing retro- 
spect over that influence which the enterprise of the dis- 
coverer of Virginia and the genius of the author of the 



198 SPENSER. 

Faery Queene have respectively produced in the fortune 
and language of England. The fancy might easily be 
pardoned for a momentary superstition, that the genius of 
their country hovered, unseen, over their meeting, cast- 
ing her first look of regard on the poet that was destined 
to inspire her future Milton, and the other on her mari- 
time hero, who paved the way for colonizing distant 
regions of the earth, where the language of England 
was to be spoken, and the poetry of Spenser to be ad- 
mired." 

Raleigh, his imagination kindled by the enchantments 
of Spenser's verse, and feeling that he had discovered 
in an Irish wilderness the greatest of living poets, pre- 
vailed on the too-happy author to accompany him to 
England. Spenser was graciously received by Eliza- 
beth, and was smitten with a courtier's hopes in receiv- 
ing a poet's welcome. 

In the early part of 1590 the first three books of The 
Faery Queene were published. Who that has read it 
can ever forget the thrill that went through him as he 
completed the first stanza? <^ 

" Lo, I the man -whose Muse whilom did mask, 
As Time her taught, in lowly shepherd's weeds, 
Am now enforced, — a far unfitter task, — 
For trumpets stern to change my oaten reeds ; 
And sing of knights' and ladies' gentle deeds, 
Whose praises, having slept in silence long. 



SPENSEE. 199 

Me, all too mean, the sacred muse areeds, 
To blazon broad amongst her learned throng: 
Fierce wars and faithful loves shall moralize my song." 

* The admiration," says Hallam, " of this great poem 
was unanimous and enthusiastic. No academy had 
been trained to carp at his genius with minute cavilling ; 
ao recent popularity, no traditional fame, interfered 
with the immediate recognition of his supremacy. The 
Faery Queene became at once the delight of every ac- 
complished gentleman, the model of every poet, the 
golace of every scholar." 

But if the aspirations of the poet were thus gratified, 
those of the courtier and politician were cruelly disap- 
pointed. Burleigh, the Lord Treasurer, to whom Spen- 
ser was merely a successful maker of ballads, and one 
pushed forward by the faction which was constantly in- 
triguing for his lordship's overthrow, contrived to inter- 
cept, delay, or divert the favor which the queen was 
willing to bestow on her melodious flatterer. The 
irritated bard, in a few memorable couplets, has re- 
corded, for the warning of all office-seekers and suppli- 
cants for the patronage of the great, his wretched ex- 
perience during the year and a half he danced attend- 
ance on the court. Rage is a great condenser ; and 
the most diffuse of poets, became the most concentrated 
when wrath brooded over the memory of wrong. 



200 SPENSEK. 

"' To fret thy sotil witli crosses and with cares ; 
To eat thy heart through comfortless despairs ; 
To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run, 
To spend, to give, to want, to be undone," — 

this was the harsh experience of the laurelled minstrel, 
fresh from the glories of fairy-land. But it is only 
charitable to allow for the different points of view from 
which different minds survey the poet. To Burleigh, 
Spenser was a rhyming suitor, clamorous for the queen's 
favor, and meditating designs on her treasury. To a 
Mr. Beeston, according to Aubrey, " he was a little 
man, who wore short hair, little band, and little cuffs." 
Did not the sullen Burleigh have a more profound ap- 
preciation of Spenser than the great world of common- 
place gossips, represented by friend Beeston ? At last, 
in February, 1591, Spenser succeeded in obtaining a 
pension of fifty pounds, and returned, but half satisfied, 
to Ireland. In a graceful poem, called Colin Clout 's 
Come Home Again, full of gratitude to Raleigh and 
adulation of Elizabeth, he described the glories and the 
vanities he had witnessed at the English Court. 

A deeper passion than that which inspired the amo- 
rous plaints of the Shepherd's Calendar, and one des- 
tined to a happier end, he now recorded in a series of 
exquisitely thoughtful and tender sonnets, under the 
general name of Amoretti ; and he celebrated its long 



SPENSER. 201 

deferred consummation in a rapturous Epithalamion. 
We have no means of judging of Elizabeth, the Irish 
maiden who prompted these wonderful poems, except 
from her transfigured image as seen reflected in Spen- 
ser's verse, — verse which has made her perfect and has 
made her immortal. The Epithalamion is the grandest 
and purest marriage-song in literature. Even Hallam, 
the least enthusiastic of critics, and one who too often 
writes as if judgment consisted, not in the inclusion, but 
exclusion of sympathy, cannot speak of this poem with- 
out an unwonted touch of ecstasy in the words which 
convey his magisterial decision. And John Wilson grows 
wild in its praise. " Joy," he says, — " Joy, Love, 
Desire, Passion, Gratitude, Religion, rejoice, in pres- 
ence of Heaven, to take possession of Affection, Beauty, 
and Innocence. Faith and Hope are bridesmaids, and 
holiest incense is burning on the altar." But the rap- 
tures of critics can convey no adequate idea of the 
deep, thoughtful, satisfying delight that breathes through 
the Epithalamion, and harmonizes its occasional starts 
of ecstasy into unity with its pervading spirit of tran- 
quil bliss. How simple and tender, and yet how in- 
tensely imaginative, is this exquisite picture of the 
bride ! 

" Behold, whiles she before the altar stands, 
Hearing the holy priest that to her speaks 



202 SPENSEE. 

And blesseth her with his two happy hands. 

How the red roses flush up in her cheeks. 

And the pure snow with goodly vermeil stain 

Like crimson dyed in grain: 

That even the angels, which continually 

About the sacred altar do remain, 

Forget their service and about her fly, 

Oft peeping in her face, that seems more fair 

The more they on it stare. 

But her sad eyes, still fastened on the ground, " 

Are governed Avith goodly modesty. 

That suffers not one look to glance awry. 

Which may let in a little thought unsound. 

Why blush ye, Love, to give to me your hand, 

The pledge of all our band? 

Sing, ye sweet angels, Allelujah sing, 

That all the woods may answer, and your echoes ring ! " 

Nothing can be more delicately poetic than the line in 
which the hands of the priest, lifted over the head of 
the bride in the act of benediction, receive a reflected 
joy from the beauty they bless : — 

"And blesseth her with his two happy hands." 

At the time of his marriage, in 1594, Spenser had 
completed three more books of The Faery Queene, and 
in 1595 he visited England for the purpose of publish- 
ing them. They appeared in 1596. During this visit 
he presented to the queen his View of the State of Ire- 
land, — a prose tract, displaying the sagacity of an 



SPENSER. 203 

English statesman, but a spirit towards the poor native 
Irish as ruthless as Cromwell's. He felt, in respect to 
the population of the country in which he was forced 
to make his home, as a Puritan New-Englander might 
have felt in regard to the wild Indians who were skulk- 
ing round his rude cabin, peering for a chance at the 
scalps of his children. Returning to Ireland, with the 
queen's recommendation for the office of Sheriff of Cork, 
his worldly fortunes seemed now to be assured. But in 
1598 the Insurrection of Munster broke out. Spenser, 
who appears, not unnaturally, to have been especially 
hated by the Irish, lost everything. His house was 
assailed, pillaged, and burned ; and in the hurry of his 
departure from his burning dwelling, it is said that his 
youngest child was left to perish in the flames. He 
succeeded, with the remaining portion of his family, in 
escaping to London, where, in a common inn, overcome 
by his misfortunes, and broken in heart and brain, on 
the 16th of January, 1599, he died. The saddest thing 
of all remains to be recorded. Soon after his death — 
such is the curt statement — " his widow married one 
Roger Seckerstone." Did Edmund Spenser, then, after 
all, appear to his wife Elizabeth as he appeared to 
Mr. Beeston, — simply as " a little man, who wore 
short hair, little band, and little cuffs " ? One would 
suppose that the memory of so much genius and glory 



204 SPENSER. 

and calamity would have been better than the presence 
of " one Roger Seckerstone " ! Among the thousands 
of millions of men born on the planet, it was her for- 
tune to be the companion of Edmund Spenser, and 
"soon after his death she married one Roger Secker- 
stone " ! It required two years of assiduous courtship, 
illustrated by sonnets which have made her name im- 
mortal, before the adoring poet could hymn, in a trans- 
port of gratitude, her acceptance of his hand ; but for- 
tunate Mr. Seckerstone did not have to wait ! She saw 
her husband laid in Westminster Abbey, mourned by 
all that was noble in rank or high in genius, and then, 
as in the case of another too-celebrated marriage, 

" The funeral baked meats 
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables ! " 

The work to which Spenser devoted the largest por- 
tion of his meditative life was The Faery Queene ; and 
in this poem the whole nature and scope of his genius 
may be discerned. Its object, as he tells us, " was to 
fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and 
gentle discipline " ; and, as doctrine embodied in persons 
is more efficient than doctrine embodied in maxims, he 
proposed to do this by means of a historical fiction, in 
which duty should be infused into the mind by the pro- 
cess of delight, and Virtue, reunited to the Beauty from 



SPENSER. 205 

which she had unwisely been severed, should be pre- 
sented as an object to be passionately loved as well as 
reverently obeyed. He chose for his subject the history 
of Arthur, the fabulous hero and king of England, as 
familiar to readers of romance then as the heroes of 
Scott's novels are to the readers of our time ; and he 
purposed " to portray in him, before he was king, the 
image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve private 
moral virtues." This plan was to be comprised in 
twelve books ; and then he proposed, in case his plan 
succeeded, '^to frame the other part of politic virtues 
in his person, after he came to be king." As only one 
half of the first portion of this vast design was com- 
pleted, as this half makes one of the longest poems in 
the world, and as all but the poet's resolute admirers 
profess their incapacity to read without weariness more 
than the first three books, it must be admitted that 
Spenser's conception of the abstract capabilities of hu- 
man patience was truly heroic, and that his confidence 
in his own longevity was founded on a reminiscence of 
Methuselah rather than on a study of vital statistics. 

But the poem was also intended by the author to be 
" one long-continued allegory or dark conceit." The 
story and the characters are symbolic as well as repre- 
sentative. The pictures that please the eye, the melody 
that charms the ear, the beauty that would seem " its 



206 SPENSER. 

own excuse for being," cover a latent meaning, not per- 
ceptible to the senses they delight, but to be interpreted 
by the mind. Philosophical ideas, ethical truths, his- 
torical events, compliments to contemporaries, satire on 
contemporaries, are veiled and sometimes hidden in 
these beautiful forms and heroic incidents. Much of 
this covert sense is easily detected ; but to explain all 
vrould require a commentator who could not only think 
from Spenser's mind, but recall from oblivion all the 
gossip of Elizabeth's court. The general intention of 
the allegorical design is given by the poet himself, in 
his letter to Raleigh. He supposes Prince Arthur, after 
his long education by Timon, " to have seen in a dream 
or vision the Faery Queene, with whose excellent 
beauty ravished, he, awaking, resolved to seek her out "; 
and, armed by the magician Merlin, Arthur went to 
seek her in fairy-land. Spenser is careful to inform us 
that by the Faery Queene he means Glory in his gen- 
eral intention, but in his particular, " the excellent and 
glorious person of our sovereign the queen, and her 
kingdom in fairy-land." And considering that she bears 
two persons, " the one of a most royal queen or em- 
press, the other of a virtuous and beautiful lady, the 
latter part in some places I do express in Belphoebe." 
Arthur he intends to be the embodiment of the virtue 
of Magnificence, or Magnanimity, as this contains all 



SPENSER. 207 

the other virtues, and is the perfection of them all ; but 
of the twelve separate virtues he takes twelve different 
knights for the patrons, making the adventures of each 
the subject of a whole book, though the magnificent 
Arthur appears in all, exercising with ease the special 
virtue, whether it be temperance, or holiness, or chas- 
tity, or courtesy, or justice, which is included in the 
rounded perfection of his moral being. The explana- 
tion of the causes of these several adventures was, in 
the poem, to be reserved to the twelfth book, of which 
the rude Irish kerns unwittingly deprived us, in depriv- 
ing us of the brain in which alone it had existence ; but 
we know that the poet's plan was, in that book, to rep- 
resent the Faery Queene as keeping her annual feast 
twelve days, " upon which the occasions of the twelve 
separate adventures happened, which, being undertaken 
by twelve separate knights," were in the twelve books 
of the poem to be severally described. Spenser defends 
his course in thus putting what might be deemed the 
beginning at the end, by discriminating between the 
poet historical and the historiographer. A historiog- 
rapher, he says, " discourseth of affairs orderly, as they 
were done, accounting as well the times as the actions 
but a poet thrusteth into the middest, ever where it 
most concern eth him, and there recoursing to things fore- 
past, and divining of things to come, maketh a pleasing 
analysis of all." 



208 SPENSER. 

In judging of the plan of the Faery Queene, we 
must remember that it is a fragment. Spenser only 
completed six books, of twelve cantos each, and a por- 
tion of another. The tradition that three unpublished 
books were destroyed by the fire which consumed his 
dwelling has, by the latest and ablest editor of his 
works, Professor F. J. Child, been rejected as un- 
founded and untenable. But, though the poem was never 
completed, we know the poet's design ; and, much as 
this design has been censured, it seems to us that the 
radical defect was not in what Spenser proposed to do, 
but in the way he did it, — not in the plan of the poem, 
but in the limitations of the poet. He conceived the 
separate details — the individual objects, persons, and 
incidents — imaginatively ; but he conceived the whole 
plan logically. He could give, and did give, elaborate 
reasons for the conduct of his story, — better reasons, 
perhaps, than Homer, or Shakespeare, or Cervantes, 
or Goethe could have given to justify the designs of his 
works ; but do you suppose that he could have given 
reasons for Una, or Florimel, or Amoret ? The truth is, 
that his design was too large and complicated for his im- 
agination to grasp as a whole. The parts, each organ- 
ically conceived, are not organically related. The result 
is a series of organisms connected by a logical bond, 
— an endless procession of beautiful forms, but no such 



SPENSER. 209 

vital combination of them as would convey unity of im- 
pression. The cumbrousness and confusion and diffusion 
which critics have recognized in the poem are to be re- 
ferred to the fact that the processes of the understanding, 
coldly contemplating the general plan, are in hopeless 
antagonism to the processes of the imagination, raptur- 
ously beholding and bodying forth the separate facts. 
The moment the poet abandons himself to his genius he 
forgets, and makes us forget, the purpose he had in view 
at the start ; and he and we are only recalled from the 
delicious dream in order that he may moralize, and that 
we may yawn. A dozen lines might be selected from any 
canto which are of more value than his statement of the 
idea of the whole poem. In truth, the combining, co- 
ordinating, centralizing, fusing imagination of the highest 
order of genius, — an imagination competent to seize and 
hold such a complex design as our poet contemplated, and 
to flash in brief and burning words details over which his 
description lovingly lingers, — this was a power denied 
to Spenser. He has auroral lights in profusion, but no 
lightning. It is not that he lacks power. The Cave 
of Despair, the description of Mammon and of Jealousy, 
the Binding of Furor, not to mention other examples, 
are full of power ; but it is not condensed into that di- 
rect executive efficiency which, in the same instant, 
irradiates, smites, and is gone. He has not so much of 



210 SPENSER. 

this power as Byron, though he greatly exceeds hira 
in fulness of matter and depth and elevation of thought. 
The poem has another defect which also answers to a 
limitation of Spenser's character. His disposition was 
soft and yielding ; and, to honor a friend or propitiate 
a patron, he did not hesitate to make his verse a vehicle 
of flattery as well as of truth. If by Prince Arthur he 
intended any real person, it was probably Sir Philip 
Sidney ; but in the sixth book he allows himself to asso- 
ciate the name of Arthur with the ignominious campaign 
of Leicester in the Netherlands, — Leicester who repre- 
sented the seven deadly sins rather than the twelve 
moral virtues. Sir Arthegall, again, stands for Lord 
Grey of Wilton, the Irish lord deputy, whom Spenser 
served as secretary ; but Grey was the exponent of 
ruthlessness rather than of justice. The flattery of 
Queen Elizabeth is so gross, that the wonder is that she 
did not behead him for irony instead of pensioning him 
for panegyric. The queen's hair was red, or, as some 
still chivalrously insist, auburn ; and Spenser, like the 
other poets of the day, is too loyal to permit the ideal 
head of beauty to wear any locks but those which are 
golden. In the first book, the Red- Cross Knight, who 
is the personification of Holiness, after being married to 
Una, who Is the personification of Truth or True Re- 
ligion, leaves her at the end of the twelfth canto to go to 



SPENSER. 211 

the court of Gloriana, the Faery Queene. Now if 
Gloriana means Glory, Holiness very improperly leaves 
True Religion to seek it; if Gloriana means Queen 
Elizabeth, it is probable that Holiness never arrived at 
his destination. 

We have thus a poet ungifted with the smiting direct- 
ness of power, the soaring and darting imagination, of 
the very highest order of minds ; a man sensitive, ten- 
der, grateful, dependent ; reverential to the unseen 
realities of the spiritual world, deferential to the crowned 
and coroneted celebrities of the world of fact ; but 
we still have not yet touched the peculiarities of his 
special genius. If we pass into the inner world of the 
poet's spirit, where he really lived and brooded, we forget 
criticism in the loving wonder and admiration evoked 
by the sight of that " paradise of devices," both " dain- 
ty " and divine. We are in communion with a nature 
in which the most delicate, the most voluptuous, sense 
of beauty is in exquisite harmony with the austerest 
recognition of the paramount obligations of goodness 
and rectitude. The beauty of material objects never 
obscures to him the transcendent beauty of holiness. 
In his Bowers of Bliss and his Houses of Pride he sur- 
prises even voluptuaries by the luxuriousness of his 
descriptions, and dazzles even the arrogant by the 
towering bravery of his style ; but his Bowers of Bliss 



212 SPENSER. 

repose on caverns of bale, and the glories of his House 
of Pride are built over human carcasses. 

This great mind ripened late ; for it was cumulative 
before it was creative, and inventiveness brooded over 
memory. With great subtlety and strength of reason, 
disciplined, exalted, and connected with imagination by 
deep study of the philosophy of Plato, his intellect, 
under the guidance of fixed spiritual ideas, roamed over 
the field of history and fiction, selecting from every 
quarter fit nutriment to feed and increase its energies. 
The mythology of Greece and Rome, the creeds and 
martyrologies of Christendom, the romance and super- 
stitions of the Middle Ages, the ideals and facts of chiv- 
alry, the literatures of every civilized nation, were all 
received into his hospitable intelligence, and more or 
less assimilated with its substance. Gradually his 
imagination, working on these multifarious materials, 
gave them form and life. Divinities, fairies, magicians, 
goblins, embodied passions, became real objects to his 
inward vision. He had 

" Sight of Proteus coming from the sea," 

and heard 

" Old Triton blow his wreathed horn." 

He began to believe, with more than the usual faith 
of the poet, in the beautiful or terrible or fantastic 
shapes with which his fancy was peopled. As they had 



SPENSER. 213 

been modified, re-created, associated with his own sym- 
pathies and antipathies, — Spenserized^ — in the imagina- 
tive process they had gone through, he felt spiritually at 
home in their company. Even when they were falsified 
by actual facts, he knew they were still the appropriate 
images of essential truths, having a validity indepen- 
dent of experience. And it was this wondrous and 
various troop of ideal shapes, palpable to his own eye 
and domesticated in his own heart, that he sent forth, in 
an endless succession of pictures, through the magical 
pages of the Faery Queene. 

It was the necessary condition of a poem, thus socia- 
bly blending Christian and Pagan beliefs, Platonic ideas, 
and barbaric superstitions, that its action should occur 
in what Coleridge happily calls " mental space." Truth 
of scenery, truth of climate, truth of locality, truth 
of costume, could have no binding authority in the 
everywhere and nowhere of Fairy-Land. Spenser's 
life was too inward to allow his observation of external 
nature to be close and exact. He had not, of course, 
the pert pretension of the artist who said that nature 
put him out, or of the French abstractionist who, 
when told that his theory did not agree with facts, 
blandly replied, " So much the worse for the facts " ; 
but his fault, if fault it was, arose from a predominance 
of his reflective and imaginative powers over his 



214 SPENSER. 

powers of observation, — from his instinctive habit of 
subordinating, in Bacon's phrase, " the shows of things 
to the desires of the mind " ; and, as the scene of his 
poem is mental and not material space, his lack of local 
truth is hardly a real defect. It is objected, for example, 
that, in his enumeration of the trees in one of his forests, 
he associates trees which in nature do not coexist ; but 
his forest is in Fairy-Land. Again, the following stanza, 
— one of the most beautiful in the poem, describing the 
melody which arose from the Bower of Bliss, — has 
been repeatedly criticised : — 

" The joyous birds, shrouded m cheerful shade, 
Their notes unto the voice attempered sweet; 
The angelical, soft, trembling voices made 
To th' instruments divine respondence meet ; 
The silver-sounding instruments did meet 
With the base murmur of the water's faU; 
The water's faU, with difference discreet, 
Now soft, now loud, unto the wind did call ; 

The gentle warbling wind low answered to all." 

it is objected that the result of such a combination of 
sounds, voices, and instruments would be discord, and 
not melody. We may be sure it made music to Spen- 
ser's soul, though he admits that it was not the music of 
earth. 

" Right hard it was for wight who did it hear 
To read what maimer music that mote be ; 



SPENSER. 215 

For all that pleasing is to living ear 
Was there consorted in one harmony ; 
Birds, voices, instruments, winds, waters, all agree." 

Again, Hallam says that the image conjured up by the 
description of Una riding 

" Upon a lowly ass more white than snow, 
But she much whiter," 

is a hideous image ; but it is evident he does not follow 
the thought of the poet, who, rapidly passing from snow 
as a material fact to snow as an emblem of innocence, 
intends to say that the white purity of Una's soul, shin- 
ing in her face and transfiguring its expression, cannot 
be expressed by the purest material symbol. The 
image of a woman's face ghastly white passed before 
Hallam's eye ; we may be sure that no such uncomely 
image was in Spenser's mind. The real meaning is 
so obvious, that its perversion by so distinguished a 
critic proves that acuteness has no irreconcilable feud 
with imaginative insensibility, and can be spiritually 
dull when it prides itself most on being intellectually 
keen. 

To this inwardness — this ideal and idealizing qual- 
ity of Spenser's soul -^ — we must add its melodiousness. 
His best thoughts were born in music. The spirit of 
poetry is not only felt in his sentiments and made visi- 



216 SPENSEE. 

ble in his imagery, but it steals out in the recurring 
chimes of his complicated stanza. Accordingly, Spen- 
ser, rather than Shakespeare and Milton, — who, as Cole- 
ridge has remarked, had "deeper and more inwoven 
harmonies," — is commonly adduced in support of the 
accredited dogma, that verse is as much an essential 
constituent of poetry as passion and imagination. But 
it seems to us that poetry is not necessarily opposed to 
prose, but to what is prosaic. It doubtless finds in the 
verse of the greatest poets its happiest and most vital 
expression ; but sometimes verse is a clog, and its man- 
agement a mechanical exercise. Much of Spenser's, 
especially in the last three books of The Faery Queene, 
is mere ingenuity in rhythm and rhyme ; and even in 
the first three books we continually light on passages 
which are essentially prosaic. Take, for example, the 
following stanza, descriptive of Immodest Mirth, and it 
will readily be seen that only the first four lines are 
poetic : — 

" And therein sat a lady fresh and fair, 
Making sweet solace to herself alone : 
Sometimes she sang as loud as lark in air, 
Sometimes she laughed, that nigh her breath was gone ; 
Yet was there not with her else any one, 
That to her might move cause of merriment ; 
Matter of mirth enough, though there were none, 
She could devise, and thousand ways invent 
To feed her foolish humor and vain joUiment." 



SPENSER. 217 

In Shakespeare's line, 

" How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank ! " 

the poetry is in the single epithet " sleeps " ; substitute 
" lies," and though the rhythm would be as perfect, the 
poetry would be gone. The soul of poetry, indeed, is 
impassioned imagination, using words, but not neces- 
sarily verse, in its expression. Bacon wrote verse, and 
execrable verse it is ; but was not Bacon a poet ? Is 
not Milton a poet in his prose? Are not the prose 
translations of the Psalms of David poetic ? The 
poetic faculty, which is vital, cannot be made to depend 
on a form which, even in undisputed poets, is so apt to 
be mechanical. Even should we admit that verse is the 
body of which poetry is the soul, cannot a soul mani- 
fest itself in a body which does not in all respects 
correspond to it ? Cannot the essential spirit of poetry 
transfigure the rudest, unrhythmic expression, as the 
soul of Socrates glorified his homely face ? It is not, 
of course, mere imagination which makes a poet ; for 
Aristotle and Newton were men of great imagination, 
scientifically directed to the discovery of new truth, 
not to the creation of new beauty. But imagination 
directed by poetic sentiment and passion to poetic ends 
does make the poet. And that these conditions are 
often fulfilled in prose, and a purely poetic impression 

10 



218 SPENSEE. 

produced, cannot be denied without resisting the evi* 
dence of ordinary experience. 

And, though there is a delicious charm in Spenser's 
sweetest verse, the finest and rarest elements of his 
genius were independent of music. That celestial light 
which occasionally touches his page with an ineffable 
beauty, and which gave to him in his own time the 
name of "the heavenly Spenser," is a more wonderful 
emanation from his mind than its subtlest melodies. 
We especially feel this in his ideal delineations of 
woman, in which he has only been exceeded by Shake- 
speare. He has been called the poet's poet ; he should 
also be called the woman's poet, for the feminine ele- 
ment in his genius is its loftiest, deepest, most angelic 
element. The tenderness, the ethereal softness and 
grace, the moral purity, the sentiment untainted by 
sentimentality, which characterize his impersonations of 
feminine excellence, show, too, that the poet's brain had 
been fed from his heart, and that reverence for woman 
was the instinct of his sensibility before it was con- 
firmed by the insight of his imagination. 

The inwardness of Spenser's genius, the constant 
reference of his creative faculty to internal ideals rather 
than to objective facts, has given his poem a special 
character of remoteness. It is often objected to his 
female characters that they are not sufficiently individ- 



SPENSER. 219 

ualized, and are too far removed from ordinary life to 
awaken human sympathy. It is to be hoped that the 
latter part of this charge is not true ; for a person who 
can have no sympathy with Una, and Belphoebe, and 
Florimel, and Amoret, can have no sympathy with the 
woman in women. But it must be conceded, that though 
Shakespeare, like Spenser, draws his women from ideal 
regions of existence, he has succeeded better in natural- 
izing them on the planet. The creations of both are 
characterized by remoteness ; but Shakespeare's are 
direct perceptions of objects ideally remote^ and strike 
us both by their naturalness and their distance from 
common nature ; Spenser really sees the objects as 
distant, and sees them through a visionary medium. 
The strong-winged Shakespeare penetrates to the region 
of spiritual facts which he embodies ; Spenser surveys 
them wonderingly from below. Shakespeare goes up ; 
Spenser looks up ; and our poet therefore lacks the 
great dramatist's '^familiar grasp of things divine." 

It remains to be said, that though Spenser's outward 
life was vexed with discontent, and fretted by his resent- 
ment of the indifference with which he supposed his 
claims were treated by the great and powerful, his po- 
etry breathes the very soul of contentment and cheer. 
This cheer has no connection with mirth, either in the 
form of wit or humor, but springs from his perception 



220 SPENSER. 

of an ideal of life, which has become a realitj to his 
heart and imagination. The Faery Queene proves that 
the perception of the Beautiful can make the heart 
more abidingly glad than the perception of the ludi- 
crous. In the soul of this seer and singer, who shaped 
the first vague dreams and unquiet aspirations of the 
youth into beautiful forms . to solace the man, there is a 
serene depth of tender joy, ay, " a sober certainty of 
waking bliss " ; and, as he has not locked up in his own 
breast this precious delight, but sent it in vital currents 
through the marvels and moralities of The Faery 
Queene to refresh the world, let no defects which criti- 
cism can discern hinder the reader from participating 
in the deep satisfaction of that happy spirit and the 
visionary glories of that celestialized imagination. 



MINOE ELIZABETHAN POETS. 

XN the present chapter we propose to speak of a few 
of Spenser's contemporaries and successors, who 
were rated as poets in their own generation, how- 
ever neglected they may be in ours. We shall select 
those who have some pretensions to originality of 
character as well as mind ; and, though we shall not 
mention all who claim the attention of students of 
literary history, we fear we shall gain the gratitude 
of the reader for those omitted, rather than for those 
included, in the survey. Sins of omission are some- 
times exalted by circumstances into a high rank among 
the negative virtues. 

Among the minor poets of this era were two imita- 
tors of Spenser, — Phineas and Giles Fletcher. They 
were cousins of Fletcher the dramatist, but with none 
of his wild blood in their veins, and none of his flashing 
creativeness in their souls, to give evidence of the rela- 
tionship. The Purple Island, a poem in twelve cantos, 
by Phineas, is a long allegorical description of the body 
and soul of man, perverse in design, melodious in ver- 
sification, occasionally felicitous in the personification 



222 MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS. 

of abstract qualities, but on the whole to be considered 
as an exercise of boundless ingenuity to produce insuf- 
ferable tediousness. Not in the dissecting-room itself is 
anatomy less poetical than in the harmonious stanzas 
of The Purple Island. Giles, the brother of Phineas, 
w^s the more potent spirit of the two, but his power is 
often directed by a taste even more elaborately bad. 
His poem of Christ's Victory and Triumph, in parts 
almost sublime, in parts almost puerile, is a proof that 
imaginative fertility may exist in a mind with little 
imaginative grasp. Campbell, however, considers him 
a connecting link between Spenser and Milton. 

Samuel Daniel, another poet of this period, was the 
son of a music-master, and was born in 1562. Fuller 
says of him, that " he carried, in his Christian and sur- 
name, two holy prophets, his monitors, so to qualify his 
raptures that he abhorred all profaneness." Amiable 
in character, gentle in disposition, and with a genius 
meditative rather than energetic, he appears to have 
possessed that combination of qualities which makes men 
personally pleasing if it does not make them perma- 
nently famous. He was patronized both by Elizabeth 
and James, was the friend of Shakespeare and Cam- 
den, and was highly esteemed by the most accomplished 
women of his time. A most voluminous writer in prose 
and verse, he was distinguished in both for the purity^ 



MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS. 223 

simplicity, and elegance of his diction. Browne calls 
him " the well-languaged Daniel." But if he avoided 
the pedantry and quaintness which were too apt to viti- 
ate the style of the period, and wrote what might be 
called modern English, it has still been found that mod- 
ern Englishmen cannot be coaxed into reading what is 
so lucidly written. His longest work, a versified His- 
tory of the Civil Wars, dispassionate as a chronicle and 
unimpassioned as a poem, is now only read by those 
critics in whom the sense of duty is victorious over the 
disposition to doze. The best expressions of his pen- 
sive, tender, and thoughtful nature are his epistles and 
his sonnets. Among the epistles, that to the Countess 
of Cumberland is the best. It is a model for all adula- 
tory addresses to women; indeed, a masterpiece of 
subtile compliment ; for it assumes in its object a sym- 
pathy with whatever is noblest in sentiment, and an 
understandinoj of whatever is most elevated in thought. 
The sonnets, first published in 1592, in his thirtieth 
year, record the strength and the disappointment of a 
youthful passion. The lady, whom he addresses under 
the name of Delia, refused him, it is said, for a wealth- 
ier lover, and the pang of this baffled affection made 
him wretched for years, and sent him 

" Haunting untrodden paths to wail apart." 
Echo, — he tells us, while he was aiming to overcome 
the indifference of the maiden, — 



224 MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS. 

" Echo, daughter of the air, 

Babbling guest of rocks and rills. 
Knows the name of my fierce fair. 
And sounds the accents of my ills." 

Throughout the sonnets, the matchless perfection of 
this Delia is ever connected with her disdain of the 
poet who celebrates it : — 

" Fair is my love, and cruel as she 's fair; 

Her brow shades frowns, although her eyes are sunny; 
Her smiles are lightning, though her pride despair ; 

And her disdains are gall, her favors honey. 
A modest maid, decked with a blush of honor. 

Who treads along green paths of youth and love, 
The wonder of all eyes that gaze upon her, 

Sacred on earth, designed a saint above." 

This picture of the " modest maid, decked with a 
blush of honor," is exquisite ; but it is still a picture, 
and not a living presence. Shakespeare, touching the 
same beautiful object with his life-imparting imagination, 
suffuses at once the sense and soul with a feeling of the 
vital reality, when he describes the French princess as 
a " maiden rosed over with the virgin crimson of mod- 
esty." 

The richest and most elaborately fanciful of these 
sonnets is that in which the poet calls upon his mistress 
to give back her perfections to the objects from which 
she derived them : — 



MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS. 225 

" Restore thy tresses to the golden ore ; 

Yield Cytherea's son those arcs of love; 
Bequeath the heavens the stars that I adore ; 

And to the orient do thy pearls remove. 
Yield thy hand's pride unto the ivory white ; 

To Arabian odors give th}^ breathing sweet; 
Restore thy blush unto Aurora bright ; 

To Thetis give the honor of thy feet. 
Let Venus have thy graces, her resigned ; 

And thy sweet voice give back unto the spheres; 
But yet restore thy fierce and cruel mind 

To Hyrcan tigers and to ruthless bears ; 
Yield to the marble thy hard heart again ; 

So shalt thou cease to plague and I to pain." 

There is a fate in love. This man, who could not 
conquer the insensibility of one country girl, was the 
honored friend of the noblest and most celebrated wo- 
man of his age. Eventually, at the age of forty, he 
was married to a sister of John Florio, to whom his 
own sister, the Rosalind who jilted Spenser, is supposed 
to have been previously united. He died in retirement, 
in 1619, in his fifty-eighth year. 

A more powerful and a more prolific poet than Daniel 
was Michael Drayton, who rhymed steadily for some 
forty years, and produced nearly a hundred thousand 
lines. The son of a butcher, and born about the year 
1563, he early exhibited an innocent desire to be a poet, 
and his first request to his tutor at college was to make 
10* o 



226 MINOE ELIZABETHAN POETS. 

him one. Like Daniel, he enjoyed the friendship and 
patronage of the noble favorers of learning and genius. 
His character seems to have been irreproachable. Meres, 
in liis Wit's Treasury, says of him, that among all sorts 
of people " he is held as a man of virtuous disposition, 
honest conversation, and well-governed carriage, which 
is almost miraculous among good wits in these declin- 
ing and corrupt times, when there is nothing but roguery 
in villanous man, and when cheating and craftiness is 
counted the cleanest wit and soundest wisdom." But 
the market-value, both of his poetry and virtue, was 
small, and he seems to have been always on bad terms 
with the booksellers. His poems, we believe, were the 
first which arrived at second editions by the simple 
process of merely reprinting, with additions, the title- 
pages of the first, — a fact which is ominous of his bad 
success with the public. The defect of his mind was 
not the lack of materials, but the lack of taste to select, 
and imagination to fuse, his materials. His poem of 
The Barons' Wars is a metrical chronicle ; his Poly- 
Olbion is an enormous piece of metrical topography, 
extending to thirty thousand twelve-syHabled lines. In 
neither poem does he view his subject from an emi- 
nence, but doggedly follows the course of events and 
the succession of objects. As a description of Eng- 
land, the Poly-Olbion is in general so accurate that it is 



MIKOK ELIZABETHAN POETS. 227 

quoted as authority by such antiquaries as Hearne and 
Wood and Nicholson. Campbell has felicitously touched 
its fatal defect in saying that Drayton " chained his po- 
etry to the map." The only modern critic who seems 
to have followed all its wearisome details with loving 
enthusiasm is Charles Lamb, who speaks of Drayton as 
that " panegyrist of my native earth who has gone over 
her soil with the fidelity of a herald and the painful 
love of a son; who has not left a rivulet (so narrow 
that it may be stepped over) without honorable men- 
tion ; and has animated hills and streams with life and 
passion above th^ dreams of old mythology." But, in 
spite of this warm commendation, the essential difficulty 
with the Poly-Olbion is, that, with all its merits, it is 
unreadable. The poetic feeling, the grace, the fresh- 
ness, the pure, bright, and vigorous diction, which char- 
acterize it, appear to more advantage in the poet's minor 
pieces, where his subjects are less unwieldy, and the 
vivacity of his fancy makes us forget his lack of high 
Imagination. His fairy poem of Nymphidia, for in- 
stance, is one of the most deliciously fanciful creations 
in the language ; and many of his smaller pieces have 
the point and sparkle of Carew's and Suckling's. In 
his longer poems, too, we frequently light upon passages 
as perfect of their kind as this description of Queen 
Isabella's hand •• — 



228 MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS. 

" She laid her fingers on his manly cheek, 

The God's pure sceptres and the darts of love, 

That with their touch might make a tiger meek, 
Or might great Atlas from his seat remove, 

So white, so soft, so delicate, so sleek, 
As she had Avorn a lily for a glove." 

A more popular poet than Daniel, or Drayton, or the 
Fletchers, was William Warner, an attorney of the Court 
of Common Pleas, who was born about the year 1558, 
and who died in 1609. His Albion's England, a poem 
of some ten thousand verses, was published in 1586, 
ran through six editions in sixteen years, and died 
out of the memory of mankind with the last, in 1612. 
After having conscientiously waded through immense 
masses of uninteresting rhyme, as we have been com- 
pelled to do in the preparation of these notices, we 
confess, with a not unmaiicious exultation, that we 
know Warner's poem only by description and extracts. 
Albion is an ancient name for Great Britain ; and Al- 
bion's England is a metrical history — " not barren," in 
the author's own words, " of inventive intermixtures " 
— of the southern portion of the island, beginning at 
the deluge, and ending with the reign of James I. As 
James might have said, " After me the deluge," Warner's 
poem may be considered as ending in some such catas- 
trophe as that with which it begins. The merit of 
Warner is that of a story-teller, and he reached classes 



MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS. . 229 

of readers to whom Spenser was hardly known by 
name. The work is a strange mixture of comic and 
tragic fact and fable, exceedingly gross in parts, 
with little power of imagination or grace of language, 
but possessing the great popular excellence of de- 
scribing persons and incidents in the fewest and sim- 
plest words. The best story is that of Argentile and 
Curan, and it is told as briefly as though it were 
intended for transmission by telegraph at the cost of 
a dollar a word. Warner has some occasional touches 
of nature and pathos which almost rival the old ballads 
for directness and intensity of feeling. The most re- 
markable of these, condensed in two of his long four- 
teen-syllabled lines, is worth all the rest of his poems. 
It occurs in his description of Queen Eleanor striking 
the Fair Rosamond. 

" With that she dashed her on the lips, so dy^d double red: 
Hard was the heart that gave the blow, soft were those lips that 
bled." 

It is a rapid transition from "Warner, the poet of 
the populace, to Donne, the poet of the metaphysicians, 
but the range of the Elizabethan literature is full 
of contrasts. In the words of the satirist, Donne is a 

poet 

" Whose muse on dromedary trots, 
Wreathes iron pokers into true-love-knots ; 



230 MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS. 

Rhyme's sturdy cripple, fanc}'- s maze and clew, 
Wit's forge and fire-blast, meaning's press and screw. 

See lewdness with theology combined, — 

A cynic and a sycophantic mind, 

A fancy shared party per pale between 

Death's-heads and skeletons and Are tine ! — 

Not his peculiar defect and crime, 

But the true current mintage of the time. 

Such were the established signs and tokens given 

To mark a loyal churchman, sound and even. 

Free from papistic and fanatic leaven." . 

John Donne, the heterogeneous qualities of whose intel- 
lect and character are thus maliciously sketched, was 
one of the strangest of versifiers, sermonizers, and men. 
He was the son of a wealthy London merchant, and 
was born in 1573. One of those youthful prodigies 
who have an appetite for learning as other boys have 
for cakes and plums, he was, at the age of eleven, 
sufficiently advanced in his studies to enter the Uni- 
versity of Oxford, where he remained three years. 
He was then transferred to Cambridge. His classical 
and mathematical education being thus completed, he, 
at the age of seventeen, was admitted into Lincoln's Inn 
to study the law. His relations being Roman Catholics, 
he abandoned the law at the age of nineteen, in order 
to make an elaborate examination of the points in dis- 
pute between the Komanists and the Reformers. Hav- 



MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS. 231 

ing in a year's time exhausted this controversy, he 
spent several years in travelling in Italy and Spain. 
On his return to England he became chief* secretary 
of Lord Chancellor EUesmere, — and held the office 
five years. It was probably during the period be- 
tween his twentieth and thirtieth years that most of 
his secular poetry was written, and that his nature took 
its decided eccentric twist. An insatiable intellectual 
curiosity seems, up to this time, to have been his leading 
characteristic ; and as this led him to all kinds of liter- 
ature for mental nutriment, his faculties, in their forma- 
tion, were inlaid with the oddest varieties of opinions and 
crotchets. With vast learning, with a subtile and pene- 
trating intellect, with a fancy singularly fruitful and 
ingenious, he still contrived to disconnect, more or less, 
his learning from what was worth learning, his intellect 
from what was reasonable, his fancy from what was 
beautiful. His poems, or rather his metrical problems, 
are obscure in thought, rugged in versification, and full 
of conceits which are intended to surprise rather than to 
please ; but they still exhibit a power of intellect, both 
analytical and analogical, competent at once to separate 
the minutest and connect the remotest ideas. This 
power, while it might not have . given his poems grace, 
sweetness, freshness, and melody, would still, if properly 
directed, have made them valuable for their thoughts ; 



232 MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS. 

but in the case of Donne it is perverted to the production 
af what is bizarj-e or unnatural, and his muse is thus as 
hostile to use as to beauty. The intention is, not to 
idealize what is true, but to display the writer's skill 
and wit in giving a show of reason to what is false. 
The effect of this on the moral character of Donne was 
pernicious. A subtile intellectual scepticism, which 
weakened will, divorced thought from action and liter- 
ature from life, and made existence a puzzle and a 
dream, resulted from this perversion of his intellect. 
He found that he could wittily justify what was vicious 
as well as what was unnatural ; and his amatory poems, 
accordingly, are characterized by a cold, hard, labored, 
intellectualized sensuality, worse than the worst im- 
purity of his contemporaries, because it has no excuse 
of passion for its violations of decency. 

But now happened an event which proved how little 
the talents and accomplishments of this voluptuary of 
intellectual conceits were competent to serve him in a 
grapple with the realities of life. Lady EUesmere 
had a niece, the daughter of Sir George Moore, 
with whom Donne fell in love ; and as, according 
to Izaak Walton, his behavior, when it would entice, 
had " a strange kind of elegant, irresistible art," he in- 
duced her to consent to a private marriage, without the 
knowledge of her father. Izaak accounts for this on 



MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS. 233 

the perhaps tenable ground, " that love is a flattering 
mischief, that hath denied aged and wise men a foresight 
of those evils that too often prove to be children of that 
blind father ; a passion that carries us to commit errors 
with as much ease as whirlwinds move feathers, and be- 
gets in us an unwearied industry to the attainment of 
what we desire." But Sir George Moore, the father of 
the lady, an arrogant, avaricious, and passionate brute, 
was so enraged at the match, that he did not rest until 
he had induced Lord Ellesmere to dismiss Donne from 
his service, and until he had placed his son-in-law in 
prison Although Sir George, compelled to submit to 
what was inevitable, became at last reconciled to Donne, 
he refused to contribute anything towards his daughter's 
maintenance. As Donne's own fortune had been by 
this time all expended in travel, books, and other intel- 
lectual dissipations, and as he had been deprived of his 
office, he was now stripped of everything but his power 
of framing conceits ; and. accordingly, in a dismal letter 
to his wife, recounting his miseries, he has nothing but 
this quibble to support her under affliction : " John 
Donne, Ann Donne, Undone." A charitable kinsman 
of the EUesmeres, however. Sir Francis Wolly, see- 
ing the helplessness of this man of brain, took him 
and his wife into his own house. Here they resided 
until the death of their benefactor, Donne occupying 



234 MINOE ELIZABETHAN POETS. 

his time in studying the civil and canon laws, and 
probably also in composing his Thesis on Self- Homicide, 
— a work in which his ingenuity is thought to have de- 
vised some excuses for suicide, but the reading of which, 
according to Hallam, would induce no man to kill him- 
self unless he were threatened with another volume. 

During his residence with Sir Francis WoUy, DonnCj 
whose acquirements in theology were immense, was 
offered a benefice by Dr. Morton, then Dean of Glou- 
cester ; but he declined to enter the Church, from a 
feeling of spiritual unfitness. It is probable that his 
habits of intellectual self-indulgence, while they really 
weakened his conscience, made it morbidly acute. He 
would not adopt the profession of law or divinity for a 
subsistence, though he was willing to depend for sub- 
sistence on the charity of others. Izaak Walton praises 
his humility ; but Donne's humility was only another 
name for indisposition to practical labor, — a humility 
which makes self-depreciation an excuse for moral lazi- 
ness, and shrinks as nervously from duty as from pride. 
Both law and divinity, therefore, he continued to make 
the luxuries of his existence. 

In good time this selfish intellectuality resulted in 
that worst of intellectual diseases, mental disgust. After 
the death of his patron, his father-in-law allowed him 
eighty pounds a year to support his family. Sickness 



MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS. 235 

and affliction and comparative poverty came to wake 
him from his dream and reveal him to himself. In some 
affecting letters, which have been preserved, he moans 
over his moral inefficiency, and confesses to an " over- 
earnest desire for the next life," to escape from the per- 
plexities of this. " I grow older,"" he says, " and not 
better ; my strength diminisheth^ and my load grows 
heavier ; and yet I would fain be or do something ; but 
that I cannot tell what, is no wonder in this time of my 
sadness ; for to choose is to do ; but to be no part of any 
body is as to be nothing : and so I am, and shall so 
judge myself, unless I could be so incorporated into a 
part of the world as by business to contribute some sus- 
tenation to the whole. This I made account ; I began 
early, when I undertook the study of our laws ; but was 
diverted by leaving that, and embracing the worst 
voluptuousness, an hydroptic immoderate desire of hu- 
man learning and languages Now I am become 

so little, or such a nothing, that I am not a subject good 

enough for one of my own letters I am rather a 

sickness or disease of the world than any part of it, and 
therefore neither love it nor life." And he closes with 
the words, " Your poor friend and God's poor patient, 
John Donne." 

And this was the mental state to which Donne was 
reduced by thirty years of incessant study, — of study 



236 MINOE ELIZABETHAN POETS. 

that sought only the gratification of intellectual caprice 
and of intellectual curiosity, — of study without a practi- 
cal object. From this wretched mood of self-disgust 
and disgust with existence, this fret of thought at the 
impotence of will, we may date Donne's gradual eman- 
cipation from his besetting sins ; for life, at such a point 
of spiritual experience, is only possible under the form 
of a new life. His theological studies and meditations 
were now probably directed more to the building-up of 
character, and less to the pandering to his gluttonous 
intellectuality. His recovery was a work of years ; and 
it is doubtful if he would ever have chosen a profession, 
if King James, delighted with his views regarding the 
questions of supremacy and allegiance, and amazed at 
his opulence in what was then called learning, had not 
insisted on his entering the Church. After much hesi- 
tation and long preparation, Donne yielded to the royal 
command. He was successively made Chaplain in Or- 
dinary, Lecturer at Lincoln's Inn, and Dean of St. 
Paul's, was soon recognized as one of the ablest and 
most eloquent preachers of his time, and impressed those 
who sat under his ministrations, not merely with admi- 
ration for his genius, but with reverence for his holy life 
and almost ascetic self-denial. The profession he had 
adopted with so much self-distrust he came to love with 
such fervor that his expressed wish was, to die in the 



MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS. 237 

pulpit, or iu consequence of his labors therein. This 
last wish was granted in 1631, in his fifty-eighth year; 
" and that body," says Walton with quaint pathos, 
" which once was a temple of the Holy Ghost " now 
became " but a small quantity of Christian dust." 

Donne's published sermons are in form nearly as 
grotesque as his poems, though they are characterized 
by profounder qualities of heart and mind. It was his 
misfortune to know thoroughly the works of fourteen 
hundred writers, most of them necessarily worthless ; 
and he could not help displaying his erudition in his 
discourses. Of what is now called taste he was ab- 
solutely destitute. His sermons are a curious mosaic of 
quaintness, quotation, wisdom, puerility, subtilty, and 
ecstasy. The pedant and the seer possess him by turns, 
and in reading no other divine are our transitions from 
yawning to rapture so swift and unexpected. He has 
passages of transcendent merit, passages which evince a 
spiritual vision so piercing, and a feeling of divine 
things so intense, that for the time we seem to be com- 
muning with a religious genius of the most exalted and 
exalting order ; but soon he involves us in a maze of 
quotations and references, and our minds are hustled by 
what Hallam calls " the rabble of bad authors " that 
this saint and sage has always at his skirts, even when 
he ascends to the highest heaven of contemplation. 



238 MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS. 

Doubtless what displeases this age added to his reputa- 
tion in his own. Donne was more pedantic than his 
clerical contemporaries only because he had more of 
that thought-suffocating learning which all of them re- 
garded with irrational respect. One of the signs of 
Bacon's superiority to his age was the cool audacity 
with which he assailed sophists, simpletons, bigots, and 
liars, even though they wrote in Latin and Greek. 

A poet as intellectual as Donne, but whose intelligence 
was united to more manliness and efficiency, was Sir 
John Davies. He was born in 1570, and was educated 
for the law. The first we hear of him, after he had 
been called to the bar, was his expulsion from the So- 
ciety of the Middle Temple, for quarrelling with one 
Richard Martin and giving him a sound beating. This 
was in 1598. The next recorded fact of his biography 
was the publication, a year afterwards, of his poem on 
the Immortality of the Soul. A man who thus com- 
bined so much pugilistic with so much philosophic 
power could not be long kept down in a country so full 
of fight and thought as England. He was soon re- 
stored to his profession, won the esteem both of Eliza- 
beth and James, held high offices in Ireland, and in 
1626 was appointed Chief Justice of England, but died 
of apoplexy before he was sworn in. 

The two works on which his fame as a poet rests are 



MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS. 239 

on tlie widely different themes of Dancing, and the Im- 
mortality of the Soul. The first is in the form of a 
dialogue between Penelope and one of her wooers, and 
most melodiously expresses " the antiquity and excel- 
lence of dancing." Only in the Elizabethan age could 
such a great effort of intellect, learning, and fancy have 
arisen from the trifling incident of asking a lady to 
dance. It was left unfinished ; and, indeed, as it is the 
object of the wooer to prove to Penelope that dancing 
is the law of nature and life, the poem could only be 
brought to an end by the exhaustion of the writer's in- 
genuity in devising subtile analogies for the wooer and 
answers as subtile from Penelope, who aids 

" The music of lier tongue 
"With the sweet speech of her alluring eyes." 

To think logically from his premises was the necessity 
of Davies's mind. In the poem on Dancing the pre- 
mises are fanciful ; in the poem on the Immortality of 
the Soul the premises are real ; but the reasoning in 
both is equally exact. It is usual among critics, even 
such critics as Hallam and Campbell, to decide that the 
imaginative power of the poem on the Immortality of 
the Soul consists in the illustration of the arguments 
rather than in the perception of the premises. But the 
truth would seem to be that the author exhibits his 
imagination more in his insight than in his imagery. 



240 MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS. 

The poetic excellence of the work comes from the 
power of clear, steady beholding of spiritual facts with 
the spiritual eye, — of beholding them so clearly that 
the task of stating, illustrating, and reasoning from them 
is performed with masterly ease. In truth, the great 
writers of the time believed in the soul's immortality, be- 
cause they were conscious of having souls ; the height 
of their thinking was due to the fact that the soul 
was always in the premises; and thought, with them, 
included imaginative vision as well as dialectic skill. 
From a lower order of minds than Shakespeare, Hooker, 
and Bacon, than Chapman, Sidney, and Davies, proceed 
the theories of materialism, for no thinking from the 
soul can deny the soul's existence. It is curious to ob- 
serve the advantage which Davies holds over his ma- 
terialistic opponents, through the circumstance that, while 
his logical understanding is as well furnished as theirs, it 
reposes on central ideas and deep experiences which they 
either want or ignore. No adequate idea of the general 
gravity and grandeur of his thinking can be conveyed 
by short extracts ; yet, opening the poem at the fourth 
section, devoted to the demonstration that the soul is a 
spirit, we will quote a few of his resounding quatrains 
in illustration of his manner : — 

" For she all natures under heaven doth pass, 

Being like those spirits which God's face do see, 



MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS. 241 

Or liRe jiimself, whose image once she was, 
Though aow, alas ! she scarce his shadow be. 

"Were she a body, 'tiow could she remain 
Within the body wnich is less than she ? 
Or how could she the world^s great shape contain, 
And in our narrow breasts contained be ? 

*-' All bodies are confined within some place, 
But she all place within herself confines ; 
AU bodies have their measure and their space ; 
But who can draw the soul's dimensive lines ? " 

The next poet we shall mention was a link of con 
nection between the age of Elizabeth and Cromwell; 
a contemporary equally of Shakespeare and Milton ; 
a man whose first work was published ten years before 
Shakespeare had produced his greatest tragedies, and 
who, later in life, defended Episcopacy against Milton. 
We refer of course to Joseph Hall. He was born in 
1574, was educated at Cambridge, and in 1597, at the 
age of twenty-three, published his satires. Originally 
intended for the Church, he was now presented with ?« 
living by Sir Robert Drury, who was also a munificent 
patron of Donne. He rose gradually to preferment, 
was made Bishop of Exeter in 1627, and translated to 
the see of Norwich in 1641. In 1643 he was deprived 
of his place and revenue by the Parliamentary Com- 
mittee of Sequestration, and died in 1656, in his eighty- 
11 p 



242 MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS. 

second year. As a churchman, he was in favor of 
moderate measures, and he had the rare good fortune 
to oppose Archbishop Laud, and to suffer under Oliver 
Cromwell. 

As a satirist, if we reject the claim of Gascoigne to 
precedence, he was the earliest that English literature 
can boast. In his own words, 

" I first adventure : follow me who list, 
And be the second English satirist." 

He had two qualifications for his chosen task, — pene- 
trating observation and unshrinking courage. The fol- 
lies and vices, the manners, prejudices, delusions, and 
crimes of his time, form the materials of his satires; 
and these he lashes, or laughs at, according as the sub- 
ject-matter provokes his indignation or his contempt. 
" Sith," he says in his Preface, " faults loathe nothing 
more than the light, and men love nothing more than 
their faults," it follows that, " what with the nature of 
the faults and the faults of the persons," it is impossible 
" that so violent an appeachment should be quietly 
brooked." But to those who are offended he vouchsafes 
but this curt and cutting defence of his jDlain-speaking : 
" Art thou guilty ? Complain not, thou art not wronged. 
Art thou guiltless ? Complain not, thou art not touched." 
These satires, however, striking as they are for their 



MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS. 243 

compactness of language and vigor of characterization, 
convey but an inadequate idea of the depth, devoutness, 
and largeness of soul displayed in Hall's theological 
writings. His Meditations, especially, have been read 
by thousands who never heard of him as a tart and 
caustic wit. But the one characteristic of sententious- 
ness marks equally the sarcasm of the youthful satirist 
and the raptures of the aged saint. 

The next writer we shall consider, Sir Henry Wotton, 
possessed one of the most accomplished and enhghtened 
minds of the age, though, unhappily for us, he has left 
few records of it in literature. He was born in 1568, 
educated at Oxford, and, leaving the university in his 
twenty-second year, passed nine years in travelling in 
Germany and Italy. On his return his conversation 
showed such wit and information that it was said to be 
" one of the delights of mankind." He entered the 
service of the Earl of Essex, and, on the discovery 
of the Earl's treason, prudently escaped to the Conti- 
nent. While in Italy he rendered a great service to 
the Scottish King ; and James, on his accession to the 
English throne, knighted him, and sent him as ambas- 
sador to Venice. He remained abroad over twenty 
years. On his return he was made provost of Eton 
College. He died in 1639, in his seventy-first year. 

Wotton is one of the few Englishmen who have sue- 



244 MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS. 

ceeded in divesting themselves of English prejudices 
without at the same time divesting themsMves of Eng- 
lish virtues. He was a man of the world of the kind 
described by Bacon, — a man " whose heart was not 
cut off from other men's lands, but a continent that 
joined to them." One of the ablest and most sagacious 
diplomatists that England ever sent abroad to match 
Italian craft with Saxon sense, he was at the same time 
chivalrous, loyal, and true. Though the author of the 
satirical definition of an ambassador, as " an honest 
man sent to lie abroad for the commonwealth," his own 
course was the opposite of falsehood. Indeed, he laid 
this down as an infallible aphorism to guide an English 
ambassador, that he should always tell the truth : first, 
because he will secure himself if called to account ; sec- 
ond, because he will never be believed, and he will thus 
" put his adversaries, who will ever hunt counter, at a 
loss." One of his many accomplishments was the art 
of saying pointed things in pithy language. At Rome, 
a priest asked him, " Where was your religion be- 
fore Luther ? " To which Wotton answered, " My 
religion was to be found then where yours is not to 
be found now, — in the written Word of God." He 
then put to the priest this question : " Do you be- 
lieve all those many thousands of poor Christians 
were damned, that were excommunicated because the 



MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS. 245 

Pope and the Duke of Venice could not agree about 
their temporal power, — even those poor Christians 
that knew not why they quarrelled ? Speak your con- 
science." The priest's reply was, " Monsieur, excuse 
me." Wotton's own Protestantism, however, did not 
consist, like that of too many others of his time and 
of ours, in hating Romanists. He w^as once asked 
whether a papist may be saved. His answer was : 
" You may be saved without knowing that. Look to 
yourself" The spirit of this reply is of the inmost 
essence of toleration. 

Cowley, in his elegy on Wotton, has touched wittily 
on those felicities of his nature and culture which made 
him so admired by his contemporaries : — 

" What shall we say ? since silent now is he, 
Who when he spoke, all things would silent be ; 
Who had so many languages in store. 
That only fame shall speak of him in more ; 
Whom England now no more returned must see: 
He 's gone to heaven on his fourth embassy. 

So well he iinderstood the most and best 
Of tongues — that Babel sent into the west, — 
Spoke them so truly, that he had, you 'd swear. 
Not only lived but been born everywhere. 

Nor ought the language of that man be less, 
Who in his breast had all things to express." 



246 MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS. 

As a poet Sir Henry Wotton is universally known by 
one exquisite little poem, The Character of a Happy 
Life, which is in all hymn-books. The general drift 
of his poetry is, to expose the hollowness of all the ob- 
jects to which as a statesman and courtier the greater 
portion of his own life was devoted. His verses are 
texts for discourses, uniting economy of words with ful- 
ness of thought and sentiment. His celebrated epitaph 
on a married couple is condensed to the point of con- 
verting feeling into wit. 

" He first deceased. She, for a little, tried 
To do without him, liked it not, and died." 

In one of his hymns he has this startling image : — 

" No hallowed oils, no gnms I need, 
No new-born drams of purging fire ; 
One rosy drop from David's seed 
Was worlds of seas to quench their ire." 

Excellent, however, of its kind as Wotton's poetry is, 
it is not equal to that living poem, his life. He was 
one of those men who are not so much makers of poems 
as subjects for poems. 

The last poet of whom we shall speak, George Her- 
bert, was one in whom the quaintness of the time found 
its most fantastic embodiment. He began life as a cour- 
tier ; and on the disappointment of his hopes, or on his 



MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS. 247 

conviction of the vanity of his ambitions, he suddenly 
changed his whole course of thought and life, became a 
clergyman, and is known to posterity only as " holy 
George Herbert." His poetry is the bizarre expression 
of a deeply religious and intensely thoughtful nature, 
sincere at heart, but strange, far-fetched, and serenely 
crotchety in utterance. Nothing can be more frigid 
than the conceits in which he clothes the great majority 
of his pious ejaculations and heavenly ecstasies. Yet 
every reader feels that his fancy, quaint as it often is, 
is a part of the organism of his character ; and that his 
quaintness, his uncouth metaphors and comparisons, his 
squalid phraseology, his holy charades and pious riddles, 
his inspirations crystallized into ingenuities, and his 
general disposition to represent the divine through the 
exterior guise of the odd, are vitally connected with 
that essential beauty and sweetness of soul which give 
his poems their wild flavor and fragrance. Amateurs in 
sanctity, and men of fine religious taste, will tell you 
that genuine emotion can never find an outlet in such 
an elaborately fantastic form ; and the proposition, ac- 
cording, as it does, with the rules of Blair and Kames 
and Whately, commands your immediate assent ; but 
still you feel that genuine emotion is there, and, if you 
watch sharply, you will find that Taste, entering holy 
George Herbert's "Temple," after a preliminary sniff 



248 MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS. 

of imbecile contempt, somehow slinks away abashed 
after the first verse at the " Church-porch : " 

" Thou whose sweet youth and early hopes enhance 
Thy rate and price, and mark thee for a treasure, 
Hearken unto a verser, who may chance 
Ehyme thee to good, and make a bait of pleasure: 
A verse may find him whom a sermon flies. 
And turn delight into a sacrifice." 

And that fine gentleman, Taste, having relieved us 
of his sweetly-scented presence, redolent with the "balm 
of a thousand flowers," — let us, in closing, quote one 
of the profoundest utterances of the Elizabethan age, 
George Herbert's lines on Man : — 

" Man is all symmetric, 
Full of proportions, one limbe to another, 

And all to all the world besides : / 

Each part may call the farthest, brother; 
For head with foot hath private amitie, 

And both with moon and tides. 

" Nothing hath got so farre 
But man hath caught and kept it, as his prey. 

His eyes dismount the highest starrer 

He is in little all the sphere. 
Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they 

Finde their acquaintance there. 



MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS. 249 

" The starres have us to bed; 
Night draws the curtain, which the sun withdraws ; 

Musick and light attend our head. 

All things unto our Jlesh are kinde 
In their descent and being ; to our minde 

In their ascent and cause. 

" More servants wait on Man 
Than he '11 take notice of; in every path 

He treads down that which doth befriend him 

When sickness makes him pale and wan. 
mightie love ! Man is one world, and hath 

Another to attend him. 

" Since then, my God, thou hast 
So brave a Palace built; dwell in it, 

That it may dwell with thee at last ! 

TiU then afford us so much wit, 
That as the world serves us we may serve thees 

And both thy servants be." 



SIDNEY AND BALEIGH. 

rr^HE characteristic of a good prose style is, thax,^ 
while it mirrors or embodies the mind that uses itj 
it also gives pleasure m itself. The quality which de- 
cides on its fulfilment of these conditions is commonly 
called taste. 

Though taste is properly under law, and should, if 
pressed, give reasons for its decisions, many of its most 
authoritative judgpae5Lts come directly from its instinct 
or insight, w^hout regard to rules. Indeed, a fine 
feeling of the beauty, melody, fitness, and vitality of 
words is often wantinof in men who are dexterous in 
the application of the principles of style ; and some 
of the most philosophic treatises on gesthetics betray 
a lack of that deep internal sense which directly pep- 
ceives the objects and qualities whose validity it is 
the ofiace of the understanding labori'^uply to demon- 
strate. 

But whether we judge of style by our perceptions or 
by principles, we all feel that there is a distinction be- 
tween persons who write books and writers whose books 
belong to literature. There is something in the mere 



SIDNEY AND EALEIGH. 251 

wording of a description of a triviality of dress or man- 
ner, by Addison or Steele, whicli gives greater mental de- 
light than the description of a campaign or a revolution 
by Alison. The principle that style is thus a vital ele- 
ment in the expression of thought and emotion, that it 
not only measures the quality and quantity of the mind 
it conveys, but has a charm in itself, makes the task of 
an historian of Hterature less difficult than it at first 
appears. Among the prose-writers of the age of Eliza- 
beth we do not, accordingly, include all who wrote in 
prose, but those in whom prose composition was labor- 
ing to fulfil the conditions of art. In many cases this 
endeavor resulted in the substitution of artifice for art ; 
and the bond which connects the invisible thought with 
the visible word, and through which the word is sur- 
charged with the life of the thought, being thus severed, 
the effect was to produce a factitious dignity, sweetness, 
and elegance by mental sleight of hand and tricks of 
modulation and antithesis. 

In one of the earliest prose-writers of the reign of 
Elizabeth, John Lyly, we perceive how easily the de- 
mand in the cultivated classes for what is fine in diction 
may degenerate into admiration of what is superfine, 
how elegant imbecility may pass itself off for elegance, 
and how hypocrisy and grimace may become a fashion 
in that high society which constitutes itself the arbiter 



252 SIDNEY AND RALEIGH. 

of taste. Lyly, a scholar of some beauty, and more in- 
genuity, of fancy, was especially fitted to corrupt a 
language whose rude masculine vigor was beginning 
to be softened into harmony and elegance ; for he was 
one of those effeminate spirits whose felicity it is to be 
born affected, and who can violate general nature with- 
out doing injustice to their own. The court of Eliza- 
beth, full of highly educated men and women, was 
greatly pleased with the fopperies of diction and senti- 
ment, the dainty verbal confectionery, of his so-called 
classic plays, and seems to have been entirely car- 
ried away by his prose romance of Euphues and his 
England, first published in 1579. In this persons of 
fashion might congratulate themselves that they could 
find a language which was not spoken by the vulgar. 
The nation, Sir Henry Blunt tells us, was in debt to 
him for a new English which he taught it; "all our 
ladies were his scholars " ; and that beauty in court was 
disregarded " who could not parley Euphuism, that is to 
say, who was unable to converse in that pure and re- 
formed English." Those who have studied the jargon 
of Holofernes in Shakespeare's Love's Labor 's Lost, 
of Fastidious Brisk in Ben Jonson's Every Man out 
of his Humour, and, later still, of Sir Piercie Shafton, 
in Scott's novel of The Monastery, can form some idea 
of this " pure and reformed English," the peculiarities 



SIDNEY AND RALEIGH. 253 

of which have been happily characterized to consist in 
"pedantic and far-fetched alhision, elaborate indirect- 
ness, a cloying smoothness and monotony of diction," 
and great fertility in " alliteration and punning." Even 
when Lyly seems really sweet, elegant, and eloquent, 
he evinces a natural suspicion of the graces of nature, 
and contrives to divorce his rhetoric from all sincerity 
of utterance. There is something pretty and puerile 
even in his expression of heroism ; and to say a good 
thing in a way it ought not to be said v/as to realize his 
hio^hest idea of art. His attitude towards what was 
natural had a touch of that condescending commisera- 
tion which Colman's perfumed, embroidered, and man- 
nered coxcomb extended to the blooming country girl 
he stooped to admire : " Ah, my dear ! Nature is very 
well, for she made you ; but then Nature could not 
have made me ! " 

This infection of the superfine in composition was felt 
even by writers for the multitude ; and in the romances 
of Greene and Lodge we have euphuism as an affecta- 
tion of an affectation. Even their habits of vulo-ar 
dissipation could not altogether keep them loyal to the 
comparative purity of the vulgar language. The fashion 
subtly affected even the style of Sidney, conscious as he 
was of its more obvious fooleries ; and to this day every 
man who has anything of the coxcomb in his brain, who 



254 SIDNEY AND RALEIGH. 

desires a dress for his thought more splendid than his 
thought, slides unconsciously into euphuism. 

The name of Sir Philip Sidney stands in the English 
imagination for more than his writings, more than his 
actions, more than his character, — for more, we had 
almost said, than the qualities of his soul. The English 
race, compound of Saxon and Norman, has been fertile 
in great generals, great statesmen, great poets, great 
heroes, saints, and martyrs, but it has not been fertile in 
great gentlemen ; and Mr. Bull, plethoric with power 
but scant in courtesy, recognizes, with mingled feelings 
of surprise and delight, his great ornamental production 
in Sidney. He does not read the Sonnets or the Arca- 
dia of his cherished darling ; he long left to an accom- 
plished American lady the grateful task of writing an 
adequate biography of the phenomenon ; but he gazes 
with a certain pathetic wonder on the one renowned 
gentleman of his illustrious house, speculates curiously 
how he came into the family, and would perhaps rather 
part with Shakespeare and Milton, with Bacon and 
Locke, with Burleigh and Soraers, with Marlborough 
and Wellington, with Latimer and Ridley, than with 
this chivalrous youth, whose " high-erected thoughts " 
were " seated in a heart of courtesy." It is not for 
superior moral or mental qualities that he especially 
prizes his favorite, for he has had children who have 



SIDNEY AND EALEIGH. 255 

exceeded Sidney in both ; but he feels that in Sidney- 
alone has equal genius and goodness been expressed in 
behavior. 

Sidney was born on the 29th of November, 1554. 
His father was Sir Henry Sidney, a statesman of ability 
and integrity. His mother was Mary, sister of Robert 
Dudley, afterwards Earl of Leicester. No pains were 
spared in the harmonious development of his powers, 
physical, mental, and moral ; and his instructors were 
fortunate in a pupil blessed, not only with the love of 
knowledge, but with the love of that virtue which he 
considered the proper end of knowledge. He was in- 
tended for public life ; and, leaving the university at the 
age of seventeen, he was shortly after sent abroad to 
study the languages, observe the manners, and mingle 
in the society of the Continent. He went nowhere with- 
out winning the hearts of those with whom he asso- 
ciated. Scholars, philosophers, artists, and men of let- 
ters, all were charmed with the ingenuous and high- 
spirited English youth, who visited foreign countries, 
not like the majority of his young countrymen, to par- 
take of their dissipations and become initiated in their 
vices, but to fill and enlarge his understanding, and en- 
noble his soul. Hubert Languet, a scholar of whom 
it is recorded " that he lived as the best of men should 
die," was especially captivated by Philip, became through 



256 SIDNEY AND EALEIGH. 

life his adviser and friend, and said, " That day on which 
I first beheld him with my eyes shone propitious to 
me!" 

After about three years' absence Sidney returned to 
England variously accomplished almost beyond any man 
of his years; brave, honorable, and just; ambitious of 
political, of military, of literary distinction, and having 
powerful connections, competent, it might be supposed, 
to aid him in any public career on which his energies 
should be concentrated. But his very perfections seem 
to have stood in the way of his advancement. Such a 
combination of the scholar, the poet, and the knight- 
errant, one so full of learning, of lofty imagination, of 
chivalrous sentiment, was too precious as a courtier to 
be employed as a man of affairs ; and Elizabeth ad- 
mired, petted, praised, but hesitated to employ him. 
So fine an ornament of the nation could not be spared 
for its defence. Even his uncle Leicester, all-powerful 
as he seemed, failed in his attempts to aid the kinsman 
who was perhaps the only man that could rouse in his 
dark and scheming soul the feeling of affection. Sid- 
ney, who did not lack the knowledge — we had almost 
said the conceit — of his own merits, and whose temper 
was naturally impetuous, was far from being contented 
with the lot which was to make him the " mirror of 
courtesy," the observed and loved of all beholders, the 



SIDNEY AND RALEIGH. 257 

Beau Brummel of the Age of Elizabeth, but which was 
to shut him out from the nobler ambitions of his manly 
and ardent nature, and prevent his taking that part 
which, both as a Protestant and as a patriot, he ached to 
perform in the stirring contests and enterprises of the 
time. Still, he submitted and waited ; and the result is, 
that the incidents of the career of this man, born a hero 
and educated a statesman, were ludicrously dispropor- 
tioned to his own expectations and to his fame. In 
1576 he was sent on an ornamental embassy to the 
Emperor of Germany. Soon after his return he suc- 
cessfully vindicated his father, who was Governor of 
Ireland, from some aspersions which had excited the 
anger of Elizabeth, and threatened his father's secre- 
tary, whom he suspected of opening his own letters to 
Sir Henry, that he would thrust his dagger into him 
if the treachery was repeated ; " and trust to it," he 
adds, " I speak it in earnest." He wrote a bold letter 
to the Queen, against her projected matrimonial alliance 
with the little French duke, on whose villanous person, 
and still more villanous soul, this " imperial votaress," 
so long walking the earth 

" In maiden meditation, fancy-free," 

had pretended to fix her " virgin " affections. He was 
shortly after, while playing at tennis, called a puppy by 

Q 



258 SIDNEY AND EALEIGH. 

the Earl of Oxford ; and it is a curious illustration of 
the aristocratic temper of the times, that our Philip, 
who saw no reasons to prevent him from thrusting his 
dagger, without heeding the usual forms of the duel, 
into the suspected heart of his father's secretary, could 
not force this haughty and insolent Earl to accept his 
challenge ; and the Queen put an end to the quarrel by 
informing him that there was a great difference in de- 
gree between earls and private gentlemen, and that 
princes were bound to support the nobility, and to insist 
on their being treated with proper respect. 

Wearied with court life, he now retired to Wilton, 
the seat of his famous sister, the Countess of Pem- 
broke, and there embodied in his Arcadia the thoughts, 
sentiments, and aspirations he could not realize in 
practice. Campbell has said that Sidney's life "was 
poetry expressed in action " ; but up to this time it had 
been poetry expressed in character, and denied an out- 
let in action. It now found an outlet in literature. 
From day to day he wrote under the eye of his beloved 
sister, with no thought of publication, page after page of 
this goodly folio. The form of the Arcadia, it must be 
confessed, is somewhat fantastic, and the story tedious ; 
but the work is still so sound at the core, so pure, strong, 
and vital in the soul that animates it, and so much in- 
ward freshness and beauty are revealed the moment we 



SIDNEY AND EALEIGH. 259 

pierce its outward crust of affectation, that no changes in 
the fashions of literature have ever been able to dislodge 
it from its eminence of place. There we may still learn 
the sweet lore of friendship and love ; there we may 
still feed the heart's hunger, equally for scenes of pas- 
toral innocence and heroic daring. A ray of 

" The light that never was on sea or land " 

gleams here and there over its descriptions, and pro- 
claims the poet. The style of the book, in its good ele- 
ments, was the best prose style which had, as yet, ap- 
peared in English literature, — vigorous, harmonious, 
figurative, and condensed. In the characterizations of 
feminine beauty and excellence Spenser and Shake- 
speare are anticipated, if not sometimes rivalled. But 
all these merits are apt to be lost on the modern reader, 
owing to the fact that, though Sidney's thoughts were 
noble and his feelings genuine, his fancy was artificial, 
and incessantly labored to lift his rhetoric on stilts. It 
will not trust Nature in her " homely russet brown," but 
bedizens her in court trappings, belaces and embroiders 
her, is sceptical of everything in sentiment and passion 
which is easily great, and sometimes so elaborates all life 
out of expression, that language is converted from the 
temple of thought into its stately mausoleum. It cannot, 
we fear, be doubted that Sidney's court life had made 



260 SIDNEY AND RALEIGH. 

him a little affected and conceited on the surface of his 
fine nature, if not in its substance. The Arcadia is rich 
in imagery, but in the same sentence we often find images 
that glitter like dew-drops, followed by images that glitter 
like icicles ; and there is every evidence that to his taste 
the icicles were finer than the dew-drops. 

It may not here be out of place to say, that, though we 
commonly think of Sidney as beautiful in face no less 
than in behavior, he was not in fact a comely gentleman. 
Ben Jonson told Drummond that he " was no pleasant 
man in countenance, his face being spoiled with pimples, 
of high blood, and long." 

In 1581 we find Sidney in Parliament. Shortly after, 
he wrote his Defence of Poesy, in which, assuming that 
the object of knowledge is right action, he attempted to 
prove the superiority of poetry to all other branches of 
knowledge, on the ground that, while the other branches 
merely coldly pointed the way to virtue, poetry enticed, 
animated, inspired the soul to pursue it. Fine as this 
defence of poetry is, the best defence of poetry is to 
write that which is good. In 1583 he was married to 
the daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham. As his whole 
heart and imagination were at this time absorbed by the 
Stella of his sonnets, the beautiful Penelope Devereux, 
sister of the Earl of Essex, and as his passion does not 
appear to have abated after her marriage with Lord 



SIDNEY AND RALEIGH. 261 

Rich, Sidney must be considered to have failed in love 
as in ambition, marrying the woman he respected, and 
losing the woman he adored. And it is curious that the 
woman he did marry, soon after his death, married the 
Earl of Essex, brother of the woman he so much de- 
sired to marry. 

In 1585 the Queen, having decided to assist the 
United Provinces, in their war against Philip of Spain, 
with an English army, under the command of Leicester, 
gratified Sidney's long thirst for honorable action by ap- 
pointing him Governor of Flushing. In this post, and 
as general of cavalry, he did all that valor and sagacity 
could do to repair the blunders and mischiefs which 
resulted from the cowardice, arrogance, knavery, and 
military impotence of Leicester. On the 22d of Sep- 
tember, 1586, in a desperate engagement near Zut- 
phen, he was dangerously wounded in attempting to 
rescue a friend hemmed in by the enemy ; and as he 
was carried bleeding from the field, he performed the 
crowning act of his life. The cup of water, which his 
lips ached to touch, but which he passed to the dying 
soldier with the words, " Thy necessity is greater than 
mine," — this beautiful Deed, worth a thousand Defences 
of Poetry, will consecrate his memory in the hearts of 
millions who will never read the Arcadia. 

Sidney lingered many days in great agony. The 



262 SIDNEY AND RALEIGH. 

prospect of his death stirred Leicester with unwonted 
emotion. " This young man," he writes, " he was my 
greatest comfort, next her Majesty, of all the world: 
and if I could buy his life with all I have, to my shirt, 
I would give it." The account of his death, by hia 
chaplain, is inexpressibly affecting. When the good 
man, to use his own words, " proved to him out of the 
Scriptures, that, though his understanding and senses 
should fail, yet that faith which he had now could not 
fail, he did, with a cheerful and smiling countenance, 
put forth his hand, and slapped me softly on the cheeks. 
Not long after, he lifted up his eyes and hands, uttering 
these words, ' I would not change my joy for the em- 
pire of the world.' .... Having made a comparison 
of God's grace now in him, his former virtues seemed to 
be nothing ; for he wholly condemned his former life. 
' All things in it,' he said, ^ have been vain, vain, 
vain.' " 

His sufferings were brought to a close on the 17th of 
October, 1586. Among the throng of testimonials to 
his excellence, called forth by his death, only two were 
worthy of the occasion. The first was the simple re- 
mark of Lord Buckhurst, that " he hath had as great 
love in this life, and as many tears for his death, as ever 
any had." The second is a stanza from an anony- 
mous poem, usually printed with the elaborate, but cold 



SIDNEY AND EALEIGH. 263 

and pedantic, eulogy of Spenser, whose tears for his 
friend and patron seemed to freeze in their passage into 
words. The stanza has been often quoted, but rarely in 
connection with the person it celebrates. 

" A sweet, attractive kind of grace, 
A full assurance given by looks, 
Continual comfort in a face, 
The lineaments of Gospel Books." 

In passing from Sidney to Raleigh, we pass to a less 
beautiful and engaging, but far more potent and compre- 
hensive spirit. We despair of doing justice to the va- 
rious efficiency of this most splendid of adventurers, all 
of whose talents were abilities, and all of whose abilities 
were accomplishments ; whose vigorous and elastic, na- 
ture could adapt itself to all occasions and all pur- 
suits ; and who, as soldier, sailor, courtier, colonizer, 
statesman, historian, and poet, seemed specially gifted to 
do the thing which absorbed him at the moment. Born 
in 1552, and the son of a Devonshire gentleman of an- 
cient family, straitened income, and numerous children, 
fortune denied him wealth, only to lavish on him all the 
powers by which wealth is acquired. In his case, one 
of the most happily constituted of human intellects was 
lodged in a physical frame of perfect soundness and 
strength, so that at all periods of his life, in the phrase 
of the spiteful and sickly Cecil, he could " toil terribly." 



264 SIDNEY AND RALEIGH. 

Action, adventure, was the necessity of his being. 
Imaginative and thoughtful as he was, the vision ot 
imagination, the suggestion of thought, went equally to 
enhghten and energize his will. Whatever appeared 
possible to his brain he ached to make actual with his 
hand. Though distinguished at the university, he left it 
at the first opportunity for active life presented to him, 
and at the age of seventeen joined the band of gentle- 
men volunteers who went to France to fight on the 
Protestant side in the civil war by which that kingdom 
was convulsed. In this rough work he passed five 
years. Shortly after his return in 1580, an Irish re- 
bellion broke out; and Raleigh, as captain of a com- 
pany of English troops, engaged in the ruthless business 
of putting it down. A dispute having occurred between 
him and the Lord Deputy, Grey, it was referred to the 
Council Board in England. Raleigh, determined, if 
possible, to escape from the squalid, cruel, and disgust- 
ing drudgery of an Irish war, exerted every resource of 
his pliant genius to ingratiate himself with Elizabeth, 
and urged his own views with such consummate art that 
he got, says the chronicler, " the Queen's ear in a trice." 
His graces of person took her fancy, as much as his 
ready intelligence, his plausible elocution, and his avail- 
able union of the large conceptions of the statesman 
with the intrepidity of the soldier, impressed her dis- 



SIDNEY AND EALEIGH. 265 

cerning mind. The tradition that he first attracted her 
regard by casting his rich cloak into a puddle to save the 
royal feet from contaminating mud, though characteris- 
tic, is probably one of those stories which are too good to 
be true. His promotion was as rapid as Sidney's was 
slow ; for he had a mind which, on all occasions, darted 
at once to the best thing to be done ; and, not content 
with deserving to be advanced, he outwitted all who in- 
trigued against his advancement. He was knighted, 
made Captain of the Guard, Seneschal of the County 
of Cornwall, Lord Warden of the Stannaries, and re- 
ceived a large grant of land in Ireland, in less than 
three years after his victorious appearance at the Coun- 
cil Board. Though now enabled to gratify those lux- 
urious tastes which poverty had heretofore mortified, and 
though so susceptible to all that can charm the senses 
through the imagination that his friend Spenser de- 
scribed him as a man 

" In whose high thoughts Pleasure had built her bower," 

still pleasure, though intensely enjoyed, had no allure- 
ments to weaken the insatiable activity of his spirit or 
moderate the audacity of his ambition. Patriot as well 
as courtier, and statesman as well as adventurer, with 
an intelligence so flexible that it could grasp great 
designs as easily as it could manage petty intrigues, and 
12 



266 SIDNEY AND RALEIGHL 

impelled by an inipatient feeling that lie was the ablest 
man of the nation, in virtue of individualizing most 
thoroughly the spirit and aspirations of the people and 
the time, he now engaged in those great maritime enter- 
prises which are inseparably associated with his name, 
— to found a colonial empire for England, and to break 
down the power and humble the pride of Spain. In 
1585 he obtained a patent from the Queen '* to appro- 
priate, plant, and govern any territorial possessions he 
might acquire in the unoccupied portions of North 
America." The result was the first settlement of Vir- 
ginia, which failed from the misconduct of the colonists 
ind the hostility of the Indians. He then engaged 
extensively in those privateering — those somewhat 
buccaneering — expeditions against the commerce and 
colonies of Spain which can be justified on no general 
principles, but which the instinct of the English people, 
hating Spaniards, hating Popery, and conscious that 
real war existed under formal peace, both stimulated 
and sanctioned. Spain, to Ealeigh, was a nation to be 
detested and warred against by every honest EngHsh- 
man for "her bloody and injurious designs, purposed 
^nd practised against Christian princes, over all of 
whom she seeks unlawful and ungodly rule and em- 
piry." 

In the height of Raleigh's favor with the Queen the 



SIDNEY AND RALEIGH. 267 

discovery of his intrigue and subsequent private mar- 
riage with one of her maids of honor brought down 
on his head the full storm of the royal virago's wrath. 
He was deprived of all the offices which gave him ad- 
mission to her august presence, and imprisoned with his 
wife in the Tower. Any other man would have been 
hopelessly ruined ; but, by counterfeiting the most ro- 
mantic despair at the Queen's displeasure, and by repre- 
senting his whole misery to proceed from being deprived 
of the sight of her red hair and painted face, he was, in 
two or three weeks, released from imprisonment. When 
free, he performed such important parliamentary ser' 
vices that he partially regained her favor, and he man' 
aged so well as to induce her to grant him the manor 
of Sherborne. As this was church property, and as Ra- 
leigh was accused by his enemies of being an atheist, 
the grant occasioned great scandal. His disgrace and 
imprisonment had filled his rivals with hope. They 
naturally thought that his offiince, which mortified the 
coquette's vanity as well as the sovereign's pride, was 
of such a nature that even Raleigh's management could 
not gloss it over ; but now they trembled with appre- 
hensions of his complete restoration to favor. One of 
them writes : " It is feared of all honest men, that Sir 
Walter Raleigh shall presently come to court ; and yet 
it is well withstood. God grant him some further resist- 



268 SIDNEY AND RALEIGH. 

ance, and that place he better deserveth if he had his 
right." 

Raleigh, unsuccessful in regaining the affection and 
esteem of his royal mistress, now thought to dazzle her 
imagination with a shining enterprise. He believed, 
with millions of others, in the fable of El Dorado, and 
conceived the place to lie somewhere in Guiana, in the 
region between the Orinoco and the Amazon. His im- 
agination was fired with the thought of penetrating to 
the capital city, where the houses were roofed with gold, 
where the common sand glistened, and the very rocks 
shone, with the precious deposit. Should he succeed, 
the consequences would be immense wealth and fame 
for himself, and immense addition to the power and 
glory of England ; and as he purposed to induce the 
native chiefs to swear allegiance to the Queen, and 
eventually to establish an English colony in the country, 
he flattered himself, in Mr. Napier's words, " that he 
would be able, by the acquisition of Guiana, vastly to 
extend the sphere of Enghsh industry and commerce, 
to render London the mart of the choicest productions 
of the New World, and to annex to the Crown a region 
which, besides its great colonial recommendations, would 
enable it to command the chief possessions of its great- 
est enemy, and from which his principal resources were 
derived." Possessed by these kindling ideas, and with 



SIDNEY AND RALEIGH. 269 

the personal magnetism to make them infectious, Ra- 
leigh does not seem to have found any difficulty in 
obtaining money and men to carry them out ; and in 
February, 1595, with a fleet of five ships, he set out for 
the land of gold. The enterprise was, of course, un- 
successful, for no El Dorado existed ; but on his return, 
at the close of the summer, he published his account of 
" The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Em- 
pire of Guiana," in which the failure of the expedition 
is recorded in connection with a profession of undis- 
turbed faith in the reality of its object, and some as- 
tounding stories are told, concerning which it is now 
difficult to decide whether Raleigh unconsciously exag- 
gerated or deliberately lied. It was his professed inten- 
tion to renew the search at once; but, the Queen 
having by this time nearly forgiven his offence, his 
ambition was stimulated by objects nearer home, and 
the quest of El Dorado was postponed to a more con- 
venient season. 

In 1596 he won great fame for his intrepidity and 
skill as Rear Admiral of the fleet which took Cadiz ; 
and in 1597 he further distinguished himself by the 
capture of Fayal. Restored to his office of Captain 
of the Guard, he was again seen by envious rivals in 
personal attendance on the Queen. Between the court 
factions of Essex and Cecil he first tried to mediate; 



270 SIDNEY AND EALEIGH. 

but, being hated by Essex, he joined Cecil for the pur- 
pose of crushing the enemy of both. The intention 
of Cecil was, to use Raleigh to depress Essex, and then 
to betray his own instrument. Essex fell ; but, as long 
as Elizabeth lived, Raleigh was safe. Cecil, however, 
took care to poison in advance the mind of her succes- 
sor with suspicions of Raleigh ; and, on James's acces- 
sion to the throne, Raleigh discovered that he was 
distrusted, and would probably be disgraced. Such a 
man was not likely to give up his offices and abdicate 
his power without a struggle ; and, as he could hope for 
no favor, he tried the desperate expedient of making 
himself powerful by making himself feared. In our 
time he would have " gone into opposition " : in the 
time of James the First " His Majesty's Opposition " 
did not exist ; and he became connected with a myste- 
rious plot to raise Arabella Stuart to the English throne, 
— trusting, as we cannot but think, in his own sagacity 
to avoid the appearance and evidence of treason, and to 
use the folly of the real conspirators as a means of 
forcing his claims on the attention of James. In this 
game, however, Cecil proved himself a more astute and 
unscrupulous politician than his late accomplice. The 
plot was discovered ; Raleigh was tried on a charge of 
treason; the jury, being managed by the government, 
found him guilty, and he was sentenced to death. The 



SIDNEY AND KALEIGH. 271 

sentence, however, was so palpably against the law and 
the evidence that it was not executed. By the exceed- 
ing grace of the good King, Raleigh was only plundered 
of his estate, sent to the Tower, and confined there for 
thirteen years. 

The restless activity of his mind now found a vent in 
experimental science and in literature ; and, taking a 
theme as large as the scope of his own mind, he set 
himself resolutely to work to write the History of the 
World. Meanwhile he spared no arts of influence, 
bribery, and flattery to get his liberty ; and at last, 
in March, 1615, was released, without being par- 
doned, on his tempting the cupidity of James with cir- 
cumstantial details of the mineral wealth of Guiana, 
and by oiFering to conduct an expedition there to open a 
gold-mine. With a fleet of thirteen ships he set sail, 
arrived on the coast in November, and sent a large par- 
ty up the Orinoco, who, after having attacked and burnt 
the Spanish town of St. Thomas, — an engagement in 
which Raleigh's eldest son lost his life, — returned to 
their sick and mortified commander with the intelligence 
that they had failed to discover the mine. The accounts 
of what afterwards occurred in this ill-fated expedition 
are so confused and contradictory that it is difiicult to 
obtain a clear idea of the facts. It is sufficient to 
say that Raleigh returned to England, laboring under 



272 SIDNEY AND RALEIGH. 

imputations of falsehood, treachery, and contemplated 
treason and piracy, and that he there found the Spanish 
ambassador clamoring in the court of James for his life. 
His ruin was resolved upon ; and, as he never had been 
pardoned, it was thought more convenient to execute 
him on the old sentence than to run the risk of a new 
Trial for his alleged offences since. In other words, it 
was resolved to use the technicalities of law to violate 
ii? essence, and to employ certain legal refinements as 
Ivistruments of murder. On the 29th of October, 1618, 
he was accordingly beheaded. His behavior on the 
soaffold was what might have been expected from the 
dauntless spirit which, in its experience of nearly the 
whole circle of human emotions, had never felt the sen- 
sation of fear. After vindicating his conduct in a manly 
and dignified speech to the spectators, he desired the 
Leadsman to show him the axe, which not being done 
at once, he said, " I pray thee, let me see it. Dost thou 
think that I am afraid of it ? " After he had taken it 
in his hand, he felt curiously along the edge, and then 
smilingly remarked to the sheriff, " This is a sharp 
medicine, but it is a physician for all diseases." After 
he had laid his head on the block, he was requested to 
turn it on the other side. " So the heart be right," he 
replied, " it is no matter which way the head lieth." 
After his forgiving the headsman, and praying a few 



SIDNEY AND RALEIGH. 273 

moments, the signal was made, which not being immedi- 
ately followed by the stroke, Raleigh said to the exe- 
cutioner : " Why dost thou not strike ? Strike, man ! " 
Two strokes of the axe, under which his frame did not 
shrink or move, severed his head from his body. The 
immense effusion of blood, in a man of sixty-six, amazed 
everybody that saw it. " Who would have thought," 
King James might have said, with another distinguished 
ornament of the royal house of Scotland, " that the old 
man had so much blood in him ! " Yes, blood enough 
in his veins, and thought enough in his head, and hero- 
ism enough in his soul, to have served England for 
twenty years more, had folly and baseness not other- 
wise willed it ! 

The superabundant physical and mental vitality of 
this extraordinary man is seen almost equally in his ac- 
tions and his writings. A courtier, riding abroad with 
the Queen in his suit of silver armor, or in attendance 
at her court, dressed, as the antiquary tells us, in " a 
white satin doublet all embroidered with white pearls, 
and a mighty rich chain of great pearls about his neck," 
he was still not imprisoned by these magnificent vanities, 
but could abandon them joyfully to encounter pestilen- 
tial climates and lead desperate maritime enterprises. 
As an orator he was not only powerful in the Commons, 
but persuasive with individuals. Nobody could resist 

12* R 



274 SIDNEY AND RALEIGH. 

his tongue. The Queen, we are told, " was much taken 
with his elocution, loved to hear his reasons, and took 
him for a kind of oracle." To his counsel, more than 
to any other man's, England was indebted for the de- 
struction of the Spanish Armada. He spoke and wrote 
wisely and vigorously on policy and government, on 
naval architecture and naval tactics. Among his public 
services we may rank his claim to be considered the in- 
troducer into Europe of tobacco and the potato. In 
political economy, he anticipated the modern doctrine of 
free trade and freedom of industry ; he first stated also 
the theory regarding population which is associated 
with the name of Malthus ; and, though himself a gold- 
seeker, he saw clearly that gold had no peculiar pre- 
ciousness beyond any other commodity, and that it was 
the value of what a nation derived from its colonies, 
and not the kind of value, which made colonies impor- 
tant. In intellectual philosophy Dugald Stewart admits 
that he anticipated his own leading doctrine in respect 
to " the fundamental laws of human belief." His cu- 
rious and practical intellect, stung by all secrets, showed 
also an aptitude for the experimental investigation of 
natural phenomena. 

And he was likewise a poet. It was one of his inten- 
tions to write an English epic ; but his busy life only 
allowed him leisure for some miscellaneous pieces. 



SIDNEY AND RALEIGH. 275 

Among these, his sonnet on his friend Spenser's Faery 
Queene would alone be sufficient to demonstrate the 
depth of his sentiment and the strength of his imagina- 
tion. 

" Methought I saw the gi'ave where Laura lay, 
Withui that Temple where the vestal flame 
Was wont to bum ; and, passing by that way 
To see that buried dust of living fame, 
Whose tomb fair Love and fairer Virtue kept, 
All suddenly I saw the Faery Queen : 
At whose approach the sord of Petrarch wept, 
And from thenceforth those Graces were not seen 
(For they this Queen attended), in whose stead 
Oblivion laid him down on Laura's hearse ; 
Hereat the hardest stones were seen to bleed, 
And groans of buried ghosts the heavens did perse : 
Where Homer's spright did tremble all for grief, 
And cursed the access of that celestial thief." 

But his great literary work was his History of the 
World, written during his imprisonment in the Tower. 
As might be supposed, his restless, insatiable, capacious, 
and audacious mind could not be content with the mod- 
ern practice, even as followed by philosophical histo- 
rians, of narrating events and elucidating laws. He 
began with the Creator and the creation, pressing into 
his service all the theology, the philosophy, and the 
metaphysics of his time, and boldly grappling with the 
most insoluble problems, even that of the Divine Es- 



276 SIDNEY AND RALEIGH. 

sence. Nearly half of the immense folio is devoted 
to sacred history ; and though the remaining portions, 
devoted to the Assyrians, the Persians, the Greeks, and 
the Romans, are commonly considered the most reada- 
ble, inasmuch as they exhibit Raleigh, the statesman and 
warrior, sociably treating of statesmen and warriors, — 
Raleigh, who had lived history, penetrating into the life 
of historical events, — we must confess to having been 
more attracted by the earlier portions, which show us 
Raleigh the scholar, philosopher, and divine, in his at- 
tempts to probe the deepest secrets of existence, his brain 
crowded with all the foolish and all the wise sayings of 
Pagan philosophers and Christian fathers and schoolmen, 
and throwing his own judgments, with a quaint simplic- 
ity and a quaint audacity, into the general mass of theo- 
logical and philosophical guessing he has accumulated. 
The style of the history is excellent, — clear, sweet, 
flexible, straightforward and business-like, discussing the 
question of the locality of Paradise as Raleigh would 
have discussed the question of an expedition against 
Spain at the councu-table of Elizabeth. There is an 
apocryphal story that he completed another volume of 
the History of the World, but, on learning that his pub- 
lisher had lost money by the first, burnt the manuscript, 
not willing that so good a man should suffer any further 
harm through him. But the story must be false ; for 



SIDNEY AND RALEIGH. 277 

such tenderness to a publisher is equally against human 
nature and author-nature. 

The defect of Raleigh's character, even when his 
ends were patriotic and noble, was unscrupulousness, — 
a flashing impatience with all moral obstacles obtruded 
in the path of his designs. He had a too confident be- 
lief in the resources of his wit and courage, in the in- 
fallibility of his insight, foresight, and power of combi- 
nation, in the unflagging vigor by vphinh he had so often 
made his will march abreast of his swiftest thought ; 
and in carrying out his projects he sometimes risked 
his conscience with almost the same joyous reckless- 
ness with which he risked his life. The noblest passage 
in his History of the World, that in which he condenses 
in the bold and striking image of a majestic tree the 
power of Rome, has some application to his own splen- 
did rise and terrible fall. " We have left Rome," he 
says, "flourishing in the middle of the field, having 
rooted up or cut down all that kept it from the eyes and 
admiration of the world. But, after some continuance, 
it shall begin to lose the beauty it had ; the storms of 
ambition shall beat her great boughs and branches one 
against another ; her leaves shall fall off, her limbs 
wither, and a rabble 0/ barbarous nations enter the 
field and cut her down." 



BACO:tT. 



I. 



"I^TEXT to Shakespeare, the greatest name of the 
Elizabethan age is that of Bacon. His life has 
been written by his chaplain. Dr. Rawley, bj Basil 
Montagu, by Lord Campbell, and by Macaulay ; yet 
none of these biographies reconciles the external facts 
of the man's life with the internal facts of the man's 
nature. 

Macaulay's vivid sketch of Bacon's career is the 
most acute, the most merciless, and for popular effect 
the most efficient, of all ; but it deals simply with ex- 
ternal events, evinces in their interpretation no deep and 
detecting glance into character, and urges the evidence 
for the baseness of Bacon with the acrimonious zeal 
of a prosecuting attorney, eager for a verdict, rather 
than weighs it with the candor of a judge deciding on 
the nature of a great benefactor of the race, who in his 
will had solemnly left his memory to " men's charitable 
speeches." When he comes to treat of Bacon as a phi- 
losopher, he passes to the opposite extreme of panegyria 
The impression left by the whole representation is not 



BACON. 279 

the impression of a man, but of a monstrous huddling 
together oi" two men, — one infamous, the other glorious, 
— which he calls by the name of Bacon. 

The question therefore arises, Is it possible to har- 
monize, in one individuality, Bacon the courtier. Bacon 
the lawyer, Bacon the statesman, Bacon the judge, with 
Bacon the thinker, philosopher, and philanthropist ? 
The antithesis commonly instituted between these is 
rather a play of epigram than an exercise of character- 
ization. The " meanest of mankind " could not have 
written The Advancement of Learning ; yet everybody 
feels that some connection there must be between the 
meditative life which produced The Advancement of 
Learning, and the practical life devoted to the advance- 
ment of Bacon. Who, then, was the man who is so 
execrated for selling justice, and so exalted for writing 
the Novum Organum ? 

This question can never be intelligently answered', 
unless we establish some points of connection between 
the spirit which animates his works and the external 
events which constituted what is called his life. As a 
general principle, it is well for us to obtain some concep- 
tion of a great man from his writings, before we give 
much heed to the recorded incidents of his career j for 
these incidents, as historically narrated, are likely to be 
false, are sure to be one-sided, and almost always need 



280 BACON. 

to be interpreted in order to convey real knowledge to 
the mind. It is ever for the interest or the malice of 
some contemporary, that every famous politician, who 
by necessity passes into history, should pass into it 
stained in character ; and it is fortunate that, in the case 
of Bacon, we are not confined to the outside records of 
his career, but possess means of information which con- 
duct us into the heart of his nature. Indeed, Bacon 
the man is most clearly seen and intimately known in 
Bacon the thinker. Bacon thinking, Bacon observing, 
Bacon inventing, — these were as much acts of Bacon 
as Bacon intriguing for power and place. " I account," 
he has said, " my ordinary course of study and medita- 
tion more painful than most parts of action are." But 
his works do not merely contain his thoughts and obser- 
vations ; they are all informed with the inmost life of 
his mind and the real quality of his nature ; and, if he 
was base, servile, treacherous, and venal, it will not re- 
quire any great expenditure of sagacity to detect the 
taint of servility, baseness, treachery, and venality in 
his writings. For what was Bacon's intellect but Ba- 
con's nature in its intellectual expression ? Everybody 
remembers the noble commencement of the Novum Or- 
ganum : " Francis of Verulam thought thus." Ay ! it is 
not merely the understanding of Francis of Verulam, 
but Francis himself that thinks ; and we may be sure 



BACON. 281 

that the thought will give us the spirit and average 
moral quality of the man ; for it is not faculties, but 
persons using faculties, persons behind faculties and 
within faculties, that invent, combine, discover, create; 
and in the whole history of the human intellect, in the 
department of literature, there has been no exercise of 
live creative faculty without an escape of characterc 
The new thoughts, the novel combinations, the fresh 
images, are all enveloped in an atmosphere, or borne on 
a stream, which conveys into the recipient mind the fine 
essence of individual life and individual disposition. It 
is more difficult to detect this in comprehensive individ- 
ualities like Bacon and Shakespeare than in narrow 
individualities like Ben Jonson and Marlowe ; but still, 
if we sharply scrutinize the impression which Bacon 
and Shakespeare have left on our minds, we shall find 
that they have not merely enlarged our reason with new 
truth, and charmed our imagination with new beauty, 
but that they have stamped on our consciousness the 
image of their natures, and touched the finest sensi- 
bilities of our souls with the subtile but potent influence 
of their characters. 

Now if we discern and feel this image and this life 
of Bacon, derived from his works, we shall find that his 
individuality — capacious, flexible, fertile, far-reaching 
as it was — » was still deficient in heat, and that this de- 



282 BACON. 

ficiency was in the very centre of his nature and sources 
of his moral being. Leaving out of view the lack of 
stamina in his bodily constitution, and his consequent 
want of those rude, rough energies and that peculiar 
Teutonic pluck which seem the birthright of every Eng- 
lishman of robust health, we find in the works as in 
the life of the man no evidence of strong- appetites or 
fierce passions or kindling sentiments. Neither in his 
blood nor in his soul can we discover any of the coarse 
or any of the fine impulses which impart intensity to 
character. He is without the vices of passion, — 
voluptuousness, hatred, envy, malice, revenge ; but he is 
also without the virtues of passion, — deep love, warm 
gratitude, capacity of unwithholding self-committal to a 
great sentiment or a great cause. This defect of inten- 
sity is the source of that weakness in the actions of his 
life which his satirists have stigmatized as baseness ; 
and, viewing it altogether apart from the vast intellec- 
tual nature modifying and modified by it, they have tied 
the faculties of an angel to the soul of a sneak. While 
narrating the events of his career, and making epi- 
grams out of his frailties, they have lost all vision of 
that noble brow, on which, it might be said, " Shame is 
ashamed to sit." Shame may be there, but it is shame 
shamefaced, — aghast at its position, not glorying in 
it! 



BACON. 283 

With this view of the intellectual character of Bacon, 
let us pass to the events of his life. He was born in 
London on the 2 2d of January, 1561, and was the 
youngest son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Keeper of the 
Great Seal. His mother, sister to the wife of Lord 
Treasurer Burleigh, possessed uncommon accomplish- 
ments even in that age of learned women. " Such be- 
ing his parents," quaintly says Dr. Rawley, " you may 
easily imagine what the issue was likely to be ; having 
had whatsoever nature or breeding could put into him." 
Sir Nicholas was a capable, sagacious, long-headed, 
cold-blooded, and not especially scrupulous man of the 
world, who, like all the eminent statesmen of Eliza- 
beth's reign, acted for the public interest without pre- 
judicing his own. Lady Bacon had, among other 
works, translated from the Italian some sermons on Pre- 
destination and Election, written by Ochinus, a divine 
of that Socinian sect which Orthodox religionists, who 
hated each other, could still unite in stigmatizing as pre- 
eminently wicked ; and, if we may judge from this cir- 
cumstance, she must have had a daring and discursive 
as well as learned spirit. The mind of the son, if it de- 
rived its weight, moderation, and strong practical bent 
from the father, derived no less its intellectual self-reli- 
ance and audacity from the mother ; and, as Francis was 
the favorite child, we may presume that the parents 



284 BACON. 

saw in him their different qualities exquisitely combined. 
As a boy, he was weak in health, indifferent to the 
sports of youth, of great quickness, curiosity, and flexi- 
bility of intellect, and with a sweet sobriety in his de- 
portment which made the Queen call him " the young 
Lord Keeper." He was a courtier, too, at an age when 
most boys care as little for queens as they do for 
nursery-maids. Being asked by Elizabeth how old he 
was, he replied that he was " two years younger than 
her Majesty's happy reign," with which answer, says the 
honest chronicler, " the Queen was much taken." Re- 
ceiving his early education under his mother's eye, and 
freely mixing with the wise and great people who visited 
his father's house, he was uncommonly mature in mind 
when, at the age of thirteen, he was sent to the Univer- 
pity of Cambridge. With his swiftness and facility of 
acquisition, it was but natural that he should easily 
master his studies ; but he did more, he subjected them 
to his own tests of value and utility, and despised them. 
Before he had been two years at college, this smooth, 
decorous stripling, who bowed so low to Dr. Whitgift, 
and was outwardly so respectful to the solemn trumpery 
about him, but was still inwardly unawed by the au- 
thority of traditions and accredited forms, coolly re- 
moved the mask from the body of learning, to find, as 
he thought, nothing but ignorance and emptiness within. 



BACON. 285 

The intellectual dictator of forty generations, Aristotle 
himself, was called up before the judgment-seat of this 
young brain, the pretensions of his philosophy silently 
sifted, and then dismissed and disowned, — not, he con- 
descended to say, " for the worthlessness of the author, 
to whom he would ever ascribe all high attributes," but 
for the barrenness of the method, " the unfruitfulness of 
the way." By profound and self-reliant meditation, he 
had already caught bright glimpses of a new path for the 
human intellect to pursue, leading to a more fertile and 
fruitful domain, — its process experience, not dogma- 
tism ; its results discoveries, not disputations ; its object 
" the glory of God and the relief of man's estate." 
This aspiring idea was the constant companion of his 
mind through all the vicissitudes of his career, — never 
forgotten in poverty, in business, in glory, in humiliation, 
— the last word on his lip, and alive in the last beat of 
his heart ; and it is this which lends to his large reason 
and rich imagination that sweet and pervasive benefi- 
cence, which is felt to be the culminating charm of his 
matchless compositions, and which refuses to allow his 
character to be deprived of benignity, even after its 
pliancy to circumstances may have deprived it of its 
title to respect. 

Before he was sixteen, he left the university, without 
taking a degree ; and his father, who evidently intended 



286 BACON. 

him for public life, sent him to France, in the train of the 
English ambassador, in order that he might learn the 
arts of statecraft. Here he resided for about two years 
and a half, enjoying rare opportunities for observing men 
and affairs, and of mingling in the society of statesmen, 
philosophers, and men of letters, who were pleased 
equally by the originality of his mind and the amenity 
of his manners. He purposed to stay some years 
abroad, and was studying assiduously at Poitiers, when, 
in February, 1579, an accident occurred which ruined 
his hopes of an early entrance upon a brilliant career, 
converted him from a scholar into an adventurer, and, in 
his own phrase, made it incumbent on him " to think 
how to live, instead of living only to think." A barber 
it was who thus decided the fate of a philosopher. His 
father, while undergoing the process of shaving, hap- 
pened to fall asleep ; and, so deep was the reverence of 
the barber for the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, that 
he did not presume to shake into consciousness so august 
a personage, but stood gazing at him in wondering ad- 
miration. Unfortunately a draft of air from an open win- 
dow was blowing all the while on " the second prop of 
the kingdom," and murdering him by inches. Sir Nich- 
olas awoke shivering ; and, on being informed by the 
barber that respect for his dignity was the cause 
of his not having been roused, he quietly said, " Your 



BACON. 287 

politeness has cost me my life." In two days after he 
' died. A considerable sum of money, which he had laid 
by in order to purchase a landed estate for Francis, was 
left unappropriated to that purpose ; and Francis, on 
his return from France, found that he had to share with 
four others the amount which his father had intended for 
him alone. Thus left comparatively poor, he solicited 
his uncle, the Lord Treasurer, for some political office, 
and, had his abilities been less splendid, he would 
doubtless have succeeded in his suit; but Burleigh's 
penetrating eye recognized in him talents in compari- 
son with which the talents of his own favorite son, Rob- 
ert Cecil, were dwarfed ; and, as his heart was set on 
Cecil's succeeding to his own great offices, he is sus- 
pected to have systematically " suppressed " the nephew 
in order that the nephew should not have the opportu- 
nity of making himself a powerful rival of the son. 

Bacon, therefore, had no other resource but the pro- 
fession -of the law; and for six years, between 1580 and 
1586, he bent his powerful mind to its study. He then 
again applied to Burleigh, hoping, through the latter's 
influence, to be " called within bars," and to be able at 
once to practise. He was testily denied. Two years 
afterwards, however, he was made " counsel learned ex- 
traordinary " to the Queen. This was an office of honor 
rather than profit ; but, as it gave him access to 



288 BACON. 

Elizabeth, it might have led to his political advance- 
ment, had not his good cousin Cecil, ever at her ear, 
represented him as a speculative man, " indulging in 
philosophic reveries, and calculated more to perplex 
than promote public business." Probably he obtained 
this idea from a letter written by Bacon to Burleigh, in 
1591, in which — wearied with waiting on fortune, 
troubled with poverty, and haunted by the rebuking vis- 
ion of his grand philosophical scheme — he solicits him 
for some employment adequate for his support, and which 
will, at the same time, leave him leisure to become a 
*' pioneer in the deep mines of truth." " Not being 
born," he says, " under Sol, that loveth honor, nor under 
Jupiter, that loveth business, but being wholly carried 
away by the contemplative planet," he proceeds to fol- 
low up this modest disclaimer of being influenced by the 
ambitions which engrossed the Cecils, with the proud, 
the imperial declaration, that he has " vast contemplative 
ends, though moderate civil ends," and " has taken all 
knowledge for his province." This appeal had no effect ; 
and as the reversion he held of the registrarship of the 
Star Chamber, worth £ 1,600 a year, did not fall in 
until twenty years afterwards, he was still fretted with 
poverty, and had to give to law and politics the precious 
hours to which philosophy would have asserted an ex- 
clusive claim. 



BACON. 289 

But politics^ and law as connected with politics, were, 
in Bacon's time, occupations by which Bacon could suc- 
ceed only at the expense of discrediting himself with 
posterity. Whatever may have been his motives for de- 
siring power, — and they were doubtless neither wholly 
selfish nor wholly noble, — power could be obtained 
only by submitting to the conditions by which power 
was then hampered. In submitting to these conditions. 
Bacon the politician may be said to have agreed with 
Bacon the philosopher ; as the same objectivity of mind 
which, as a philosopher, led him to seek the law of phe- 
nomena in nature, and not in the intelligence, led him 
as a politician to seek the law of political action in cir- 
cumstances, and not in conscience. " Nature is com- 
manded by obeying her," is his great philosophical 
maxim. Events are commanded by obeying them, was 
probably his guiding maxim of civil prudence. In each 
case the principle was derived from without, and not from 
within ; and he doubtless thought that, as in the one 
case it led to power over nature, so in the other it would 
lead to power over states. As his political life must be 
considered an immense mistake ; as the result of his 
theory in civil affairs was, to make him the servant, and 
not the master, of his intended instruments ; as he was 
constantly inferior in power to persons inferior to him in 
mind ; as he had to do the bidding of masters who would 
13 s 



290 BACON. 

not profit by his advice ; and as his wisdom was no 
match, in the real tug of affairs, for men who acted either 
from good or from bad impulses and instincts, — it is 
well to trace his failure to its source. The fault was 
partly in Bacon, partly in his times, and partly inherent 
in politics. He thought he possessed the genius of 
action, because, in addition to his universality of mind 
and universality of acquirement, he was the deepest ob- 
server of men, had the broadest comprehension of 
affairs, and could give the wisest counsel, of any states- 
man of his time. He was practically sagacious beyond 
even the Cecils ; for if they could, better than he, see 
an inch before the nose, he could see the continuation 
of that inch along a line of a thousand miles. Still his 
was not specially the genius of action, but the genius 
which tells how to act wisely. In the genius of action, 
the mind is passionately concentrated in the will ; in the 
genius which tells how to act wisely, the force of the 
will is somewhat expended in enlarging the area over 
which the mind sends its glance. In the genius of ac- 
tion, there is commonly more or less effrontery, wilful- 
ness, cunning, narrowing of the mind to the mere busi- 
ness of the moment, with little foresight of consequences ; 
in the genius which tells how to act wisely there is true 
practical wisdom. Unhappily, principles are, in politics^ 
so complicated with passions, and power is so often the 



BACON. 291 

prize of insolent demerit, that the two have rarely been 
combined in one statesman ; and history exhibits scores of 
sterile and stunted intellects, pushed by rough force into 
ruling positions, for one instance of comprehensive in- 
telligence impelled by audacious will. 

As a politician, Bacon had a difficult game to play. 
Entering the House of Commons in 1593, he at once 
showed himself the ablest speaker and debater of his 
time. It is said that Lord Eldon, the stanchest of Tories, 
declared in his old age, that, if he could recommence his 
political career, he would begin " in the sedition line " ; 
and Bacon at first tried the expedient of attacking a 
government measure, in order to force his abilities on 
the notice of Burleigh, and perhaps obtain by fear what 
he could not obtain by favor. But the reign of the 
haughty and almost absolute Elizabeth was not the 
period for such tactics, and he narrowly escaped arrest 
and punishment. He then recurred to a design, formed 
three years before, of opposing the Lord Treasurer by 
means of a rival ; for at the court and in the councils 
of the Queen there were two factions, — one devoted to 
Burleigh, the counsellor of Elizabeth, the other to the 
Earl of Essex, her lover. These factions were divided 
by no principle ; the question was not, how should the 
government be carried on, but hy whom should the gov- 
ernment be carried on j and the object of each was to 



292 BACON. 

engross the favor of Elizabeth, in order to engross the 
power and patronage of office. Bacon, judging that 
Essex, who held the Queen's affections, would be suc- 
cessful over Burleigh, who only held her judgment, had 
already attached himself to the fortunes of Essex. It 
may be added that, as his grand philosophical scheme 
for the interpretation of nature depended on the patron- 
age of government for its complete success, he saw that, 
if Essex triumphed, he might be able to gratify his 
philosophic as well as pohtical ambition ; for the Earl, 
with every fault that can coexist with valor, generosity, 
and frankness, — fierce, proud, wilful, licentious, and 
headstrong, — had still a soul sensitive to literary as to 
military glory, while Burleigh was indifferent to both. 
It may be doubted if Bacon was capable of intense, all- 
sacrificing friendship for anybody, especially for a man 
like Essex. It is probable that what his sagacity de- 
tected as the rule which governed the political friend- 
ships of Caesar may to some extent apply to his own. 
" Caesar," he says, "made choice of such friends as a man 
might easily see that he chose them rather to be instru- 
ments to his ends than for any good-will to them." But 
it is still certain that for ten years he was the wisest 
counsellor of Essex, by his admirable management kept 
the Earl's haughty and headlong spirit under some con- 
trol of wisdom, and never allowed him to take a false 



BACON. 293 

step without honestly pointing out its folly. He was the 
Philippe de Commines to this Charles the Rash. 

Essex, on his part, urged the claims of Bacon with 
the same impetuosity with which he threw himself into 
everything he undertook. But he constantly failed. In 
1594 he tried to get Bacon appointed Attorney- General, 
and he failed. He then tried to get Bacon appointed 
Solicitor- General, and failed, — failed not because the 
Queen was hostile to Bacon, but because she desired to 
show that she was not enslaved by Essex. He then 
urged Bacon's suit to Lady Hatton, wliom Bacon de- 
sired to marry, not for her temper, which was that of an 
eccentric termagant, but for her fortune ; and here, for- 
tunately for Bacon, he again failed. He then gave 
Bacon a landed estate, which Bacon sold for £ 1,800 ; 
and soon afterwards Bacon was in sucji pecuniary dis- 
tress as to be arrested and sent to a sponging-house, for 
a debt of £ 500. Such were the obligations of Bacon 
to Essex. What were the obligations of Essex to 
Bacon ? Ten years of faithful service, ten years of the 
" time and talents " of the best head for large affairs in 
Europe. At last the Queen and Essex quarrelled. 
"Bacon, himself serenely superior to passion, but adroit 
in calming the passions of others, exerted infinite skill 
and address to reconcile them ; but the temper of each 
was too haughty to yield. The occasion of the final 



294 . BACON. 

and deadly feud between them looks ludicrous as the 
decisive event in the life of a hero. Essex held a 
monopoly of sweet wines ; that is, the Queen had 
granted to him, for a certain period, the exclusive privi- 
lege of plundering all her subjects who drank sweet 
wines. He asked for a renewal of his patent, and was 
refused. Taking this refusal as a proof that his enemies 
were triumphant at court, he~ then organized a for- 
midable conspiracy against the government, and, for a 
purely personal object, without the pretence of any pub- 
lic aim, attempted to seize the Queen's person, oversi^ 
turn her government, and convulse the kingdom with 
civil war. He was arrested, tried, and executed. Ba- 
con, as Queen's counsel, appeared against him on his 
trial, and, by the Queen's command, wrote a narrative 
of the facts which justified the government in its course. 
For this most of his biographers represent him as guilty 
of the foulest treachery, ingratitude, and baseness. Let 
us see how it probably appeared to Bacon. The asso- 
ciation of politicians of which Essej: was the head, and 
to which Bacon belonged, was an association to obtain 
power and office by legal means ; treason and insurrec- 
tion were not in the " platform " ; and the rule of honor 
which applies to such a body is plain. It is treacherous 
for any of the followers to betray the leader, but it is 
also treacherous for the leader to betray any of the foi* 



BACON. 295 

lowers. Nobody pretends that Bacon betrayed Essex, 
but it is very evident that Essex betrayed Bacon ; for 
Bacon, the confidant, as he supposed, of the most secret 
thoughts and designs of Essex, liable to be compromised 
by his acts, and already lying under the suspicion and 
displeasure of Elizabeth on account of his strenuous 
advocacy of the Earl's claims to her continued favor, 
suddenly discovers that Essex had given way to passions 
as selfish as they were furious ; that he had committed 
high-treason, and recklessly risked the fortunes of his 
political friends, as welljas personal confederates, on the 
hazard of an enterprise as wicked as it was mad. 
Henry Wotton, ^ho was private secretary to Essex, 
but not engaged in the conspiracy, still thought it pru- 
dent to escape to the Continent, and not trust to the 
chances of a trial ; and Bacon was more in the confi- 
dence of Essex than Wotton. If Essex had no con- 
science in extricating himself from his difiiculties by 
treason, why blame Bacon for extricating himself from 
complicity with Essex by censuring his treason ? To 
the indignation that Bacon must have felt in finding 
himself duped and betrayed by the man whose interests 
he had identified with his own must be added his indig- 
nation at the treason itself; for the politician had not 
so completely absorbed the patriot but that he may have 
felt genuine horror at the idea of compassing personal 



296 BACON. 

ends by civil war. In. the case of Essex, the crime was 
really aggravated by the ingratitude which Bacon's 
critics charge on himself. Bacon, it seems, was a mean- 
spirited wretch, because he did not see the friend who 
had given him £ 1,800 in the public enemy. But is it 
to be supposed that a friend will be more constant than 
a lover? And Essex, the lover of the Queen, made 
war upon her, — upon her who, frugal as she was in 
dispensing honors and money, had lavished both on him. 
She had given him in all what would now be equivalent 
to £ 300,000 ; and then, on her refusal to allow him to 
continue cheating those of her subjects who drank sweet 
wines, the exasperated hero attempted to overthrow her 
government. But Essex acted from his passions, — 
and passions, it seems, atone for more sins than even 
charity can cover. History itself has here sided against 
reason; and the fame of Bacon, the intellectual bene- 
factor of the world, will probably, through all time, be 
sacrificed to that of this hot-blooded, arrogant, self- 
willed, and greedy noble. Intellect is often selfish ; but 
nothing is more frightfully selfish, after all, than passion. 
It would be well if the character of Bacon were 
justly open to no severer charge than that founded on 
his connection with Essex. But " worse remains be- 
hind." In 1603 Elizabeth died, and James, King of 
Scotland, succeeded to the English throne. Bacon at 



BACON. 297 

once detected in him the characteristic defect of all the 
Stuarts. " Methought," he wrote to a friend, " his 
Majesty ratlier asked counsel of the time past than of 
the time to come." Yet he paid assiduous court to 
James, and especially won his favor by advocating in 
Parliament the union of England and Scotland. By a 
combination of hard work and soft compliances he grad- 
ually obtained the commanding positions, though not 
the commanding influence, of his political ambition. In 
1609 he was made Solicitor- Gen eral ; in 1613, Attor- 
ney-General ; in 1616, Privy Councillor ; in 1617, Lord 
Keeper; in 1618, Lord Chancellor and Baron Veru- 
1am; in 1621, Viscount St. Albans. These eighteen 
years of his life exhibit an almost unparalleled activity 
and fertility of mind in law, politics, literature, and phi- 
losophy ; but in the reign of James I. no man could 
rise to the positions which Bacon reached without com- 
promises with conscience and compromises with intelli- 
gence which it is doubtless provoking that Bacon did not 
scorn. Even if we could pardon these compromises on 
the principle that events must be obeyed in order to be 
commanded, it is still plain that his obedience did not 
lead to real command. He unquestionably expected 
that his position would enable him to draw the gov- 
ernment into his philosophical scheme of waging a 
systematic war on Nature, with an army of investi- 
13* 



298 BACON. 

gators, to force her to deliver up her secrets ; but the 
Solomon who was then king of England preferred to 
spend his money on quite different objects ; and Bacon's 
compliances, therefore, gave him as little real power 
over Nature as real power in the direction of affairs. 
As it is our purpose not to excuse, but to explain, 
•Bacon's conduct, — to identify the Bacon who during 
this period wrote The Advancement of Learning, The 
Wisdom of the Ancients, and the Novum Organum, 
with the Bacon who within the same period was con- 
nected with the abuses of James's administration, — let 
us survey his character in relation to his times. He 
lived in an epoch when the elements of the English 
Constitution were in a state of anarchy. The King 
was following that executive instinct which brought the 
head of his son to the block. The House of Commons 
was following that legislative instinct which eventually 
gave it the control of the executive administration. 
James talked, and feebly acted, in the spirit of an abso- 
lute monarch, looked upon the House of Commons as 
only an instrument for getting at the money of his sub- 
jects, and when it occupied itself in presenting griev- 
ances, instead of voting subsidies, either dissolved it in a 
pet or yielded to it in a fright. Had Bacon's nature 
been as intense as it was sagacious, had he been a reso- 
lute statesman of the good or bad type, this was the 



BACON. 299 

time for him to have anticipated Hampden in the Com- 
mons, or Strafford in the Council, and given himself, 
body and soul, to the cause of freedom or the cause of 
iespotism. He did neither ; and there is nothing in his 
writings which would lead us to suppose that he could 
have done either. The written advice he gave James 
and Buckingham on the improvement of the law, on 
church affairs, and on affairs of state, would, if it had 
been followed, have saved England from the necessity 
for the Long Parliament, Oliver Cromwell, and William 
of Orange. As it was, he probably prevented more evil 
than he was made the instrument of committing. But, 
after counselling wisely, he, like other- statesmen of his 
time, consented to act against his own advice. He lent 
the aid of his professional skill to the court, yet rather 
as a lawyer who obeys a client than as a statesman re- 
sponsible to his country. And the mischief was, that his 
mind, like all comprehensive minds, was so fertile in 
those reasons which convert what is abstractly wrong 
into what is relatively right, that he could easily find 
maxims of state to justify the attorney-general in doing 
what the statesman in the attorney-general condemned, 
especially as the practice of these maxims enabled the 
attorney-general to keep his office and to hope for a 
higher one. This was largely the custom with all Eng- 
lish public men down to the time when " parliamentary 



300 BACON. 

government " was thoroughly established. Besides, Ba- 
con's attention was scattered over too many objects to 
allow of an all-excluding devotion to one. He could not 
be a Hampden or a Strafford, because he was Bacon. 
Accomplished as a courtier, politician, orator, lawyer, ju- 
rist, statesman, man of letters, philosopher, with a wide- 
wandering mind that swept over the domain of positive 
knowledge only to turn dissatisfied into those vast and 
lonely tracts of meditation where future sciences and 
inventions slept in their undiscovered principles, it was 
impossible that a man thus hundred-eyed should be 
single-handed. He also lacked two elements of strength 
which in that day lent vigor to action by contracting 
thought and inflaming passion. He was without pohti- 
cal and theological prejudice, and he was without 
political and theological malignity. 

But, it may be asked, if he was too broad for the 
passions of politics, why did he become a politician 
at all ? First, because he was an Englishman, the 
son of the Keeper of the Great Seal, and had 
breathed an atmosphere of politics — and of not very 
scrupulous politics — from his cradle ; second, because, 
well as he thought he understood nature, he under- 
stood human nature far better, and was tempted into 
affairs by conscious talent ; and third, because he was 
poor, dependent, had immense needs, and saw that poll- 



BACON, 301 

tics had led his father and uncle to wealth and power. 
And, coming to the heart of the matter, if it be asked 
why a mind of such grandeur and comprehensiveness 
should sacrifice its integrity for such wealth as office 
could give, and such titles as James could bestow, we 
can answer the question intelligently only by looking at 
wealth and titles through Bacon's eyes. His conscience 
was weakened by that which gives such splendor 
and attractiveness to his writings, — his imagination. 
He was a philosopher, but a philosopher in whose char- 
acter imagination was co-ordinated with reason. This 
imagination was not merely a quality of his intellect, 
but an element of his nature : and as, through its in- 
stinctive workings, he was not content to send out his 
thoughts stoically bare of adornment, or limping and 
ragged in cynic squalor, but clothed them in purple and 
gold, and made them move in majestic cadences : so also, 
through his imagination, he saw, in external pomp and 
affluence and high place, something that corresponded 
to his own inward opulence and autocracy of intellect; 
recognized in them the superb and fitting adjuncts and 
symbols of his internal greatness ; and, investing them 
with a glory not their own, felt that in them the great 
Bacon was clothed in outward circumstance, that the in- 
visible person was made palpable to the senses, embod- 
ied and expressed to all eyes as the man 



302 BACON. 

"Whom a wise king and Nature chose 
Lord Chancellor of both their Laws." 

So strong was this illusion, that, when hurled from 
power and hunted by creditors, he refused to raise money 
by cutting down the woods of his estate. " I will not," he 
said, "be stripped of my fine feathers." He had so 
completely ensouled the accompaniments and " compli- 
ment extern" of greatness, that he felt, in losing them, 
as if portions of the outgrowth of his being had been 
rudely lopped. 

But a day of reckoning was at hand, which was to 
dissipate all this visionary splendor, and show the hol- 
lowness of all accomplishments when unaccompanied by 
simple integrity. Bacon had idly drifted with the 
stream of abuses, until at last he partook of them. It is 
to his credit, that, in 1621, he strenuously advised the 
calling of the Parliament by which he was impeached. 
The representatives of the people met in a furious mood, 
and exhibited a menacing attitude towards the court ; 
and the King, thoroughly cowed, made haste to give up 
to their vengeful justice the culprits at whom they 
aimed. Bacon was impeached for corruption in his 
high office, and, in indescribable agony and abasement 
of spirit, was compelled by the King to plead guilty to 
the charges, of a large portion of which he was certainly- 
innocent. The great Chancellor has ever since been 



BACON. 303 

imaged to the honest English imagination as a man with 
his head high up in the heaven of contemplation, 
seemingly absorbed in sublime meditations, while his 
hand is held stealthily out to receive a bribe ! On the 
degree of his moral guilt it is difficult at this time to 
decide. The probability seems to be that, in accord- 
ance with a general custom, he and his dependents re- 
ceived presents from the suitors in his court. The pres- 
ents were given to influence his decision of caseSc He 
— at once profuse and poor — took presents from both 
parties, and then decided according to the law. He 
was exposed by those who, having given money, were 
exasperated at receiving " killing decrees " in return, — 
who found that Bacon did not sell injustice, but justice. 
He was sentenced to pay a fine of £ 40,000 ; to be im- 
prisoned in the Tower during the King's pleasure ; 
to be forever incapable of holding any public office, 
place, or employment ; and forbidden to sit in Par- 
liament or come within the verge of the Court. Bacon 
seems himself to have considered that a notorious 
abuse, in which other chancellors had participated, 
was reformed in his punishment. He is reported to 
have said, afterwards, in conversation, " I was the just- 
est judge that was in England these fifty years ; but it 
was the justest censure in Parliament that was these 
two hundred years." The courts of Russia are now 

\ 



304 BACON. 

notoriously" corrupt ; in some future time, "when the na- 
tion imperatively demands a reformation of the judicial 
tribunals, some great Russian, famous as a thinker and 
man of letters as well as judge, will, though compara- 
tively innocent, be selected as a victim, and the whole 
system be rendered infamous in his condemnation. 

Bacon lived five years after his disgrace ; and, during 
these years, though plagued by creditors and vexed by 
domestic disquiet, he prosecuted his literary and scien- 
tific labors with singular vigor and success. In revising 
old works, in producing new, and in projecting even 
greater ones than he produced, he displayed an energy 
and opulence of mind wonderful even in him. He died 
on the 9 th of April, 1626, in consequence of a cold 
caught in trying an experiment to ascertain if flesh 
might not be preserved in snow as well as salt ; and 
his consolation in his last hours was, that the " ex- 
periment succeeded excellently well." There are two 
testimonials to him, after he was hurled from power and 
place, which convey a vivid idea of the benignant stateli- 
ness of his personal presence, — of the impression he 
made on those contemporaries who were at once his 
intimates and subordinates, and who, in the most famil- 
iar intercourse, felt and honored the easy dignity with 
which his greatness was worn. " My conceit of his 
person," says Ben Jonson, " was never increased towards 



BACON. 305 

him by Lis place or honors ; but I have and do rever- 
ence him for the greatness that was only proper to him- 
self ; in that he seemed to me ever, by his work, one 
of the greatest men, and most worthy of admiration, 
that had been in many ages. In his adversity, I ever 
prayed that God would give him strength ; for greatness 
he could not want." And Dr. Rawley, his domestic 
chaplain, who saw him as he appeared in the most 
familiar relations of his home, remarks, with quaint 
veneration, " I have been induced to think that, if ever 
there were a beam of knowledge derived from God upon 
any man in these modern times, it was upon him." 



BACOlSr. 



11. 



"TTTE propose in this chapter to give some account of 
' * Bacon's writings ; and the first place in such an 
account belongs to his philosophical works relating to 
the interpretation of nature. 

As Bacon, from his boyhood, was a thinker living in 
the thick of affairs, with a discursive reason held in 
check by the pressure of palpable facts, he equally 
escaped the narrowness of the secluded student and the 
narrowness of the practical man of the world. It was 
therefore but natural that, early in his collegiate life, he 
should feel a contempt for the objects and the methods 
of the philosophy current among the scholars of his 
time. The true object of philosophy must be either to 
increase our knowledge or add to our power. The an- 
cient and scholastic systems seemed to him to have 
failed in both. They had not discovered truths, they 
had not invented arts. Admitting that the highest use 
of knowledge was the pure joy it afforded the intellect, 
and that its lowest use was its ministration to the practi- 
cal wants of man, it seemed to him evident that their 



BACON. 307 

method led as little to knowledge that enriched the mind 
as to knowledge that gave cunning to the hands. Aim- 
ing at self-culture by self-inspection, rather than by in- 
spection of nature, they had neglected, he thought, the 
great world of God for the little world of man ; so that 
at last it seemed as if the peculiar distinction of knowl- 
edge consisted in knowing that nothing could be known. 
But the question might arise, Was not the barrenness 
of their results due to the selfish littleness, rather than 
the disinterested elevation, of their aim ? Introduce into 
philosophy a philanthropic motive, make man the thinker 
aid man the laborer, unite contemplation with a prac- 
tical purpose, and discard the idea that knowledge was 
intended for the exclusive gratification of a few selected 
spirits, and philosophy would then increase in largeness 
and elevation as much as it would increase in useful- 
ness ; for if such a revolution in its spirit, object, and 
method could be made, it would continually furnish new 
truths for the intellect to contemplate, from the impetus 
given to the discovery of new truths by the perception 
that they could be applied to relieve human necessities. 
If it were objected that philosophy could not stoop from 
her ethical and spiritual heights to the drudgery of in- 
vestigating natural law^s, it might be answered, that what 
God had condescended to create it surely was not ig- 
noble in man to examine ; " for that which is deserving 



C^ 



308 BACON. 

of existence is deserving of knowledge, the image o^ 
existence." If philosophers had a higher notion of their 
dignity, Francis Bacon did not share it ; and, accord- 
ingly, early in life he occupied his mind in devising a 
method of investigating the secrets of nature in order 
to wield her powers. 

The conception was one of the noblest that ever en- 
tered the mind of m^n ; but was it accomplished ? As 
Bacon's name seems to be stereotyped in popular and 
scientific speech as the " Father of the Inductive Sci- 
ences," and as all the charity refused to his life has been 
heaped upon his philosophical labors, it may seem pre- 
sumptuous to answer this question in the negative ; yet 
nothing is more certain than that the inductive sciences 
have not followed the method which he invented, and 
have not arrived at the results which he proposed to 
accomplish. 

The mistake, as it regards Bacon, has risen princi- 
pally from confounding induction with the Baconian 
method of induction. If we were to teU our readers 
that there were great undiscovered laws in nature, and 
should strongly advise them to examine particular facts 
with great care, in order through them to reach the 
knowledge of those laws, we should recommend the 
practice of induction ; but even if they should heed and^ 
follow the advice, we much doubt if any scientific dis- 



BACON. 309 

coveries would ensue. Indeed, if Bacon himself could 
hear the recommendation made, and could adopt the 
modern mode of spiritual communication, there would 
be a succession of indignant raps on the editorial table, 
which, being interpreted, would run thus : " Ladies and 
gentlemen, the mode of induction recommended to you 
is radically vicious and incompetent. Truth cannot be 
discovered in that way ; but if you will select any given 
matter which requires investigation, and will follow the 
mechanical mode of procedure laid down in my method 
of induction (Novum Organ um, Book II.), you will be 
able, without any special scientific genius, to hunt the 
very form and essence of the nature you seek to its last 
hiding-place, and compel it to yield up its innermost 
secret. All that is required is common capacity, united 
with persevering labor and combination of purpose." 
This is not exactly Bacon's rhetoric ; but, as spirits, when 
they leave the body, seem somehow to acquire a certain 
pinched and poverty-stricken mode of expression, it will 
do to convey his idea. 

Bacon, the philosoplier, is therefore to be considered, 
not as a man who invented and recommended induction, 
for induction is as old as human nature, — was, in fact, 
invented by Adam, — and, as practiced in Bacon's time, 
was the mark of his especial scorn ; but he is to be con- 
sidered as one who invented and recommended a new 



310 BACON. 

method of induction, a system of precise rules to guide 
induction, a new logic, or organ, which was to supersede 
the Aristotelian logic. He proudly called it his art of 
inventing sciences. A method of investigation presup- 
poses, of course, some conception of the objects to be 
investigated ; and of the infinite variety and complexity 
of nature Bacon had no idea. His method proceeds on 
the notion that all the phenomena of nature are capable 
of being referred to combinations of certain abstract 
qualities of matter, — simple natures, which are limited 
in number if difficult of access. Such are density, rarity, 
heat, cold, color, levity, tenuity, weight, and the like. 
These are the alphabet of nature ; and, as all words 
result from the combination of a few letters, so all phe- 
nomena result from the combination of a few elements. 
What is gold, for example, but the co-ordination of cer- 
tain qualities, such as greatness of weight, closeness 
of parts, fixation, softness, etc. ? Now, if the causes 
of these simple natures were known, they might be 
combined by man into the same or a similar substance ; 
'' for," he says, " if anybody can make a metal which 
has all these properties, let men dispute whether it be 
gold or no." But these qualities are not ultimate ; they 
are the effects of causes, and a knowledge of the causes 
will enable us to superinduce the effects. The connec- 
tion between philosophy and practice is this, that what 



BACON. 311 

* in contemplation stands for cause, in operation stands 
for means or instrument ; for we know by causes and 
operate by means." The object of philosophy, there- 
fore, is the investigation of the formal causes of the 
primary qualities of matter, of those causes which are 
always present when the qualities are present, always 
absent when the qualities are absent, increase with their 
increase, and decrease with their decrease. Facts, then, 
are the stairs by which we mount into the region of 
essences ; and, grasping and directing these, we can 
compel nature to create new facts, as truly natural as 
those she spontaneously, produces, for art simply gives 
its own direction to her working. 

From this exposition it will be seen how little founda- 
tion there is for Dugald Stewart's remark, that Bacon 
avoided the fundamental error of the ancients, according 
to whom " philosophy is the science of causes " ; and 
also for the assertion oi Comte and his school, that 
Bacon was the father of positive science. There is 
nothing more repugnant to a positivist than the introduc- 
tion into science of causes and essences ; yet it was after 
these that Bacon aimed. " The spirit of man," he says, 
" is as the lamp of God, wherewith he searcheth the 
inwardness of all secrets." The word he uses is 
" Form," but Form with him is both cause and essence, 
an immanent cause, a cause that cr-^.ates a permanent 



312 BACON. 

quality. If he sometimes uses Form as synonymous 
with Law, the sense in which he understands Law is not 
merely the mode in which a force operates, but the 
force itself. Indeed, there is reason to suppose that, 
much as he decries Plato, he was still willing to use 
Form as identical with Idea, in the Platonic sense of 
Idea ; for in an aphorism in which he severely condemns 
the projection of human conceits upon natural objects, 
lie remarks that " there is no small difference between 
the idols of the human mind and the ideas of the Di- 
vine Mind, that is to say, between certain idle dogmas 
and the real stamp and impression of created objects as 
they are found in Nature." Coleridge had perhaps 
this aphorism in mind when he called Bacon the British 
Plato. 

The object of Bacon's philosophy, then, is the inves- 
tigation of the forms of simple natures ; his method is 
the path the understanding must pursue in order to 
arrive at this object. This method is a most ingenious 
but cumbrous machinery for collecting, tabling, sifting, 
testing, and rejecting facts of observation and experi- 
ment which have any relation to the nature sought. It 
begins with inclusion and proceeds by exclusion. It has 
affirmative tables, negative tables, tables of comparison, 
tables of exclusion, tables of prerogative instances. 
From the mass of individual facts originally collected 



BACON. 313 

everything is eliminated, until nothing is left but the 
form" or cause which is sought. The field of induction 
is confined, as it were, within a triangular space, at the 
base of which are the facts obtained by observation and 
experiment. From these the investigator proceeds in- 
wards, by comparison and exclusion, constantly narrow- 
ing the field as he advances, until at last, all non-essen- 
tials being rejected, nothing is left but the pure form. 

Nobody can read the details of this method, as given 
at length in the second book of the Novum Organum, 
without admiration for the prodigious constructive power 
of Bacon's mind. The twenty-seven tables of preroga- 
tive instances, or " the comparative value of facts as 
means of investigation," would alone be sufficient to prove 
the comprehensiveness of his intellect and its capacity 
of ideal classification. But still the method is a splendid, 
unrealized, and we may add, incompleted, dream. He 
never himself discovered anything by its use. Nobody 
since his time has discovered anything by its use. And 
the reason is plain. Apart from its positive defects, there 
is this general criticism to be made, that a true method 
must be a generalization from the mental processes 
which have heen followed in discovery and invention ; it 
cannot precede them. If Bacon really had devised the 
method which succeeding men of science slavishly fol- 
lowed, he would deserve more than the most extrava- 

14 



314 BACON. 

gant panegyrics he has received. Aristotle is famous as 
a critic for generalizing the rules of epic and dramatic 
poetry from the practice of Homer and the Greek trage- 
dians ; what fame would not be his, if his rules had 
preceded Homer and the Greek dramatists ? Yet Ma- 
caulay, and many others who have criticised Bacon, 
while pretending to depreciate all rules as useless, still 
say that Bacon's analysis of the inductive method is a 
true and good analysis, and that the method has since 
his time been instinctively followed by all successful in- 
vestigators of nature, — as if Bacon had not constructed 
his inductive rules from a deep-rooted distrust of men's 
inductive instincts. But it is plain to everybody who 
has read Comte and Mill and Whewell, that the method 
of discovery is still a debatable question ; and, with all 
our immense superiority to the age of Bacon in the pos- 
session of facts on which to build a method, we have 
settled as yet on no philosophy of the objects or the 
processes of science. There are many disputed meth- 
ods, but no accepted method ; the anarchy of opinions 
here corresponds to the anarchy in metaphysics ; and 
the establishment of a philosophy of discovery and in- 
vention must wait the establishment of a philosophy 
of the mind which discovers and invents. 

But we know enough to give the reasons of Bacon's 
failure. The defects of his method can be demonstrated 



BACON. 316 

from the separate judgments of his warmest eulogists. 
First, Bacon was no mathematician, and Playfair admits 
that " in all physical inquiries where mathematical rea- 
soning has been employed, after a few principles have 
been established by experience, a vast multitude of 
truths, equally certain with the principles themselves, 
have been deduced from them by the mere application 
of geometry and algebra." Bacon's prevision, then, did 
not extend to the foresight of the great part that mathe- 
matical science was to perform in the interpretation of na- 
ture. Second, Sir John Herschel, who follows Playfair 
in making Bacon the father of experimental philosophy, 
still gives a deadly blow to Bacon's celebrated tables 
of prerogative instances, considered as real aids to the" 
understanding, when he admits that the same sagacity 
which enables an inquirer to assign an instance or ob- 
servation to its proper class, enables him, without that 
process, to recognize its proper value. Third, Sir James 
Mackintosh, who claims for Bacon, that, if he did not 
himself make discoveries, he taught mankind the method 
by which discoveries are made, and who asserts that the 
physical sciences owe all that they are or ever will be to 
Bacon's method and spirit, refers to the 104th aphorism 
of the first book of the Novum Organum, as containing 
the condensed essence of his philosophy. This aphorism 
affirms that the path to the most general truths is a 



316 BACON. 

series of ascending inductive steps ; that the lowest gen- 
eralizations must first be established, then the middle 
principles, then the highest. It is curious that Mackin- 
tosh should praise a philosopher of facts for announcing 
a theory which facts have disproved. The merest glance 
at the history of the sciences shows that the opposite 
principle is rather the true one ; that the most general 
principles have been first reached. Mill can excuse 
Bacon for this blunder only by saying that he could not 
have fallen into it if there had existed in his time a 
single deductive science, such as mechanics, astronomy, 
optics, acoustics, etc., now are. Of course he could not ; 
but the fact remains that he did not foresee the course, 
or prescribe the true method, of science, and that he did 
not even appreciate the way in which his contempo- 
raries, Kepler and Galileo, were building up sciences by 
processes different from his own. It is amazing, how- 
ever, that Mackintosh — with his knowledge of the 
discovery of the law of gravitation, the most univer- 
sal of all natural laws, as an obvious contradiction of 
the theory — should have adopted Bacon's error. 

Fourth, Bacon's method of exclusion, the one element 
of his system which gave it originality, proceeds, as 
John Stuart Mill has pointed out, on the assumption 
that a phenomenon can have but one cause ; and is there- 
fore not applicable to coexistences, as to successions, of 
phenomena. 



/ BACON. 317 

Fifth, Bacon's method, though it proceeds on a con- 
ception of nature which is an hypothesis exploded, and 
though it^ itself an hypothesis which has proved 
sterile, still does not admit of hypotheses as guides to 
investigation. The last and ablest editor of his philo- 
sophical works, Mr. Ellis, concedes the practical in- 
utility of his method on this ground, that the process by 
which scientific truths have been established " involves 
an element to which nothing corresponds in Bacon's 
tables of comparison and exclusion ; namely, the appli- 
cation to the facts of observation of a principle of 
arrangement, an idea, existing in the mind of the dis- 
coverer antecedently to the act of induction." 

Indeed, Bacon's method was disproved by his own 
contemporaries. Kepler tried twenty guesses on the 
orbit of Mars, and the last fitted the facts. Galileo de- 
duced important principles from assumptions, and then 
brought them to the test of experiment. Gilbert's hy- 
pothesis, that " the earth is a great natural magnet with 
two poles," is now more than an hypothesis. The 
Novum Organum contains a fling at the argument from 
final causes ; and, the very year it was published, Har- 
vey, the friend and physician of Bacon, by reasoning on 
the final cause of the valves in the veins, discovered the 
circulation of the blood. All these men had the scien- 
tific instinct and scientific genius that Bacon lackedo 



318 BACON. 

They made no antithesis between the anticipation of na- 
ture and the interpretation of nature, but thej antici- 
pated in order to interpret. It is not the disuse of hy- 
potheses, but the testing of hypotheses by facts, and the 
willingness to give them up when experience decides 
against them, which characterizes the scientific mind. 

Sixth, Bacon, though he aimed to institute a philoso- 
phy of observation, and gave rules for observing, was 
not himself a sharp and accurate observer of nature, — 
did not possess, as has often been remarked, acuteness 
in proportion to his comprehensiveness. His Natural 
History, his History of Life and Death, of Density and 
Rarity, and the like, all prove a mental defect disquali- 
fying him for the business. His eye roved when it 
should have been patiently fixed. He caught at resem- 
blances by the instinct of his wide-ranging intellect, 
and this peculiarity, constantly indulged, impaired his 
power of distinguishing differences. He spread his 
mind over a space so large that its full strength was 
not concentrated on anything. He could not check the 
discursive action of his intellect and hold it down to 
the sharp, penetrating, dissecting analysis of single ap- 
pearances ; and his brain was teeming with too many 
schemes to allow of that mental fanaticism, that fury of 
mind, which impelled Kepler to his repeated assaults on 
the tough problem of the planetary orbits. The same 



BACON. 319 

bewildering multiplicity of objects which prevented 
him from throwinoj his full force into affairs and takins: 
a decided stand as a statesman, operated likewise to dis- 
sipate his energies as an explorer of nature. The 
analogies, relations, likenesses of things occupied his 
attention, to the exclusion of a searching examination of 
the things themselves. As a courtier, lawyer, jurist, poli- 
tician, statesman, man of science, student of universal 
knowledge, he has been practically excelled in each de- 
partment by special men, because his intellect was one 
which refused to be arrested and fixed. 

And, in conclusion, the essential defect of the Baco- 
nian method consists in its being an invention of genius 
to dispense with the necessity of genius. It w^as, as Mr. 
Ellis has well remarked, " a mechanical mode of pro- 
cedure, pretending to lead to absolute certainty of 
result." It levelled capacities, because the virtue was in 
the instrument used, and not in the person using it. 
Bacon illustrates the importance of his method by say- 
ing that a man of ordinary ability with a pair of com- 
passes can describe a better circle than a man of the 
greatest genius without such help ; that the lame, in the 
path, outstrip the swift who wander from it ; indeed, the 
very skill and swiftness of him who runs not in the 
right direction only increases his aberration. With his 
view of philosophy, — as the investigation of the forms of 



320 BACON. 

a limited number of simple natures, — he thought that, 
with " the purse of a prince and the assistance of a peo- 
ple," a sufficiently copious natural history might be 
formed, within a comparatively short period, to furnish 
the materials for the working of his method ; and then 
the grand instauration of the sciences would be rapidly 
completed. In this scheme there could, of course, be 
only one great name, — the name of Bacon. Those 
who collected the materials, those who applied the 
method, would be only his clerks. His office was that 
of Secretary of State for the interpretation of nature ; 
Lord Chancellor of the laws of existence, and Legislator 
of science ; Lord Treasurer of the riches of the uni- 
verse ; the Intellectual Potentate equally of science and 
art, with no aristocracy round his throne, but with a 
bureaucracy in its stead, taken from the middle class of 
intellect and character. There was no place for Har- 
vey and Newton and Halley and Dalton and La Place 
and Cuvier and Agassiz ; for genius was unnecessary : 
the new logic, the Novum Organum, — Bacon him- 
self, mentally alive in the brains which applied his 
method, — was all in all. Splendid discoreries would be 
made, those discoveries would be beneficently applied, but 
they would be made by clerks and applied by clerks. All 
these discoveries were latent in the Baconian method, and 
over all the completed intellectual globe of science, as in 



BACON. 321 

the commencement of tlie Novum Organum, would be 
written, " Francis of Verulam thought thus ! " And if 
Bacon's method had been really followed by succeeding 
men of science, this magnificent autocracy of under- 
standing and imagination would have been justified ; 
and round the necks of each of them would be a collar, 
on which would be written, " This person is so and so, 
* born thrall ' of Francis of Verulam." That this serene 
feeling of spiritual superiority, and consciousness of 
being the founder of a new empire in the world of 
mind, was w Bacon, we know by the general tone of 
his writings, and the politic contempt with which he 
speaks of the old autocrats, Aristotle and Plato ; and 
Harvey, who knew him well, probably intended to hit 
this imperial loftiness, when he described him as " writ- 
ing philosophy like a Lord Chancellor." " The guillo- 
tine governs ! " said Barrere, gayly, when some friend 
compassionated his perplexities as a practical statesman 
during the Reign of Terror. " The Method governs ! " 
would have been the reply of a Baconian underhng, 
had the difiiculties of his attempts to penetrate the in- 
most mysteries of nature been suggested to him. 

Thus, by the use of Bacon's own method of exclusion 
we exclude him from the position due of right to Gali- 
leo and Kepler. In the inquiry respecting the father 
of the inductive sciences, he is not " the nature sought." 
14* u 



322 BACON. 

What, then, is the cause of his fame among the scien- 
tific men of England and France ? They certainly 
have not spent their time in investigating the forms 
of simple natures ; they certainly have not used his 
method : why have they used his name ? 

In answer to this question, it may be said that Bacon, 
participating in the intellectual movement of the higher 
minds of his age, recognized the paramount importance 
of observation and experiment in the investigation of na- 
ture ; and it has since been found convenient to adopt, 
as the father and founder of the physical sciences, one 
whose name lends to them so much literary prestige, and 
who was undoubtedly one of the broadest, richest, and 
most imperial of human intellects, if he was not one of 
the most scientific. Then he is the most eloquent of all 
discoursers on the philosophy of science, and the general 
greatness of his mind is evident even in the demonstra- 
ble errors of his system. No other writer on the sub- 
ject is a classic, and Bacon is thus a link connecting 
men of science with men of letters and men of the 
world. Whewell, Comte, Mill, Herschel — with more 
abundant material, with the advantage of generalizing 
the philosophy of the sciences from their history ~ are 
instinctively felt by every reader to be smaller men 
than Bacon. As thinkers, they appear thin and un- 
fruitful when we consider his fulness of suggestive 



BACON. '323 

thought ; as writers, they have no pretension to the 
massiveness, splendor, condensation, and regal dignity 
of his rhetoric. The Advancement of Learning, and 
the first book of the Novum Organum, are full of 
quotable sentences, in which solid wisdom is clothed in 
the aptest, most vivid, most imaginative, and most 
executive expression. If a man of science at the pres- 
ent day wishes for a compact statement in which to em- 
body his scorn of bigotry, of dogmatism, of intellectual 
conceit, of any of the idols of the human understanding 
which obstruct its perception of natural truth, it is to 
Bacon that he goes for an aphorism. 

And it is doubtless true that the spirit which animates 
Bacon's philosophical works is a spirit which inspires 
effort and infuses cheer. It is impossible to say how far 
this spirit has animated inventors and discoverers. But 
we know, from the enthusiastic admiration expressed for 
him by men of science who could not have been blind 
to the impotence of his method, that all minds his spirit 
touched it must have influenced. One principle stands 
plainly out in his writings, — that the intellect of man, 
purified from its idols, is competent for the conquest 
of nature ; and to this glorious task he, above all other 
men, gave an epical dignity and loftiness. His superb 
rhetoric is the poetry of physical science. The hum- 
blest laborer in that field feels, in reading Bacon, that he 



324 BACON. 

himself is one of a band of heroes, wielding weapons 
mightier than those of Achilles and Agamemnon, engaged 
in a siege nobler than that of Troy; for, in so far as he is 
honest and capable, he is " Man, the minister and inter- 
preter of Nature," concerned, " not in the amplification 
of the power of one man over his country, nor in the 
amplification of the power of that country over other 
countries, but in the amplification of the power and 
kingdom of mankind over the universe." And, while 
Bacon has thus given an ideal elevation to the pursuit 
of science, he has at the same time pointed out most 
distinctly those diseases of the mind which check or 
mislead it in the task of interpretation. As a student 
of nature, his fame is greater than his deserts ; as a stu- 
dent of human nature, he is hardly yet appreciated ; 
and it is to the greater part of the first book of the No- 
vum Organum — where he deals in general reflections on 
those mental habits and dispositions which interfere with 
pure intellectual conscientiousness, and where his benefi- 
cent spirit and rich imagination lend sweetness and beau- 
ty to the homeliest practical wisdom — that the reader 
impatiently returns, after being wearied with the details 
of his method given in the second book. His method 
was antiquated in his own lifetime ; but it is to be feared 
that centuries hence his analysis of the idols of the 
human understanding will be as fresh as human vanity 
and pride. 



BACON. 325 

It was not, then, in the knowledge of nature, but in 
the knowledge of human nature, that Bacon pre-emi- 
nently excelled. By this it is not meant that he was a 
metaphj'^sician in the usual sense of the term, — though 
his works contain as valuable hints to metaphysicians as 
to naturalists, — for these hints are on matters at one 
remove from the central problems of metaphysics. In- 
deed, for all those questions which relate to the nature 
of the mind and the mode by which it obtains its ideas, 
for all questions which are addressed to our speculative 
reason alone, he seems to have felt an aversion almost 
irrational. They appeared to him to minister to the 
delight and vain-glory of the thinker without yielding 
any fruit of wisdom which could be applied to human 
affairs. "Pragmatical man," he says, "should not go 
away with an opinion that learning is like a lark, that 
can mount, and sing, and please herself, and nothing 
else ; but may knoAV that she holdeth as well of the 
hawk, that can soar aloft, and can also descend and 
strike upon the prey." Not, then, the abstract qualities 
and powers of the human mind, considered as special 
objects of investigation independent of individuals, but 
the combination of these into concrete character, in- 
terested Bacon. He regarded the machinery in motion ; 
the human being as he thinks, feels, and lives ; men in 
their relations with men : and the phenomena presented 



326 BACON. 

in history and life he aimed to investigate as he would 
investigate the phenomena of the natural world. This 
practical science of human nature, in which the dis- 
covery of general laws seems hopeless to every mind 
not ample enough to escape being overwhelmed by the 
confusion, complication, and immense variety of the de- 
tails, — and which it will probably take ages to complete, 
— this science Bacon palpably advanced. His emi- 
nence here is evident from his undisputed superior- 
ity to other prominent thinkers in the same depart- 
ment. Hallam justly remarks, that, " if we compare 
what may be found in the sixth, seventh, and eighth 
books De Augmentis; in the Essays, the History of 
Henry VII., and the various short treatises contained in 
his " [Bacon's] " works on moral and political wisdom, 
and on human nature (from experience of which all such 
wisdom is drawn) ; — if we compare these works of Ba- 
con with the rhetoric, ethics, and politics of Aristotle, or 
with the histories most celebrated for their deep insight 
into civil society and human character, — with Thucydi- 
des, Tacitus, Philippe de Commines, Machiavel, Davila, 
Hume, — we shall, I think, find that one man may be 
compared with all these together." 

The most valuable peculiarity of this wisdom is, that 
it not merely points out what should be done, but it 
points out how it can be done. This is especially true 



BACON. 327 

of all his directions for the culture of the individual 
mind ; the mode by which the passions may be disci- 
plined, and the intellect enriched, enlarged, and strength- 
ened. So with the relations of the individual to his 
household, to society, to government: he indicates the 
method by which these relations may be known and the 
duties they imply performed. In his larger specula- 
tions, regarding the philosophy of law, the principles of 
universal justice, and the organic character of national 
institutions, he anticipates, by the sweep of his intellect, 
the ideas of the jurists and historians of the present 
century. Volumes have been written which are merely 
expansions of this statement of Bacon, that " there are in 
nature certain fountains of justice, whence all civil laws 
are derived but as streams ; and like as waters do take 
tinctures and tastes from the soils through which they 
run, so do civil laws vary according to the regions and 
governments where they are planted, though they pro- 
ceed from the same fountain." The Advancement of 
Learning, afterwards translated and expanded into the 
Latin treatise De Augmentis, is an inexhaustible store- 
house of such thoughts, — thoughts which have consti- 
tuted the capital of later thinkers, but which never 
appear to so much advantage as in the compact imagi- 
native form in which they were originally expressed. 
It is important, however, that, in admitting to the full 



328 BACON. 

Bacon's just claims as a philosopher of human nature, 
we should avoid the mistake of supposing him to have 
possessed acuteness in the same degree in which he 
possessed comprehensiveness. Mackintosh says that he 
is " probably a single instance of a mind which in 
philosophizing always reaches the point of elevation 
whence the whole prospect is commanded, without ever 
rising to that distance which prevents a distinct percep- 
tion of every part of it." This judgment is accurate as 
far as it regards parts as elements of a general view ; 
but in the special view of single parts Bacon has been 
repeatedly excelled by men whom it would be absurd 
to compare to him in general wisdom. His mind was 
contracted to details by effort ; it dilated by instinct. 
It was telescopic rather than microscopic : its observa- 
tion of men was extensive rather than minute. " Were 
it not better," he asks, " for a man in a fair room to set 
up one great light, or branching candlestick of lights, 
than to go about with a small watch-candle into every 
corner ? " Certainly ; but the small watch-candle, in 
some investigations, is better than the great central 
lamp ; and his genius accordingly does not include the 
special genius of such observers as La Bruyere, E-oche- 
foucauld, Saint-Simon, Balzac, and Shaftesbury, — the 
detective police of society, politics, and letters, — men 
whose intellects were contracted to a sharp, sure, 



BACON. 329 

rat-like peering into the darkest crevices of individual 
natures, whose eyes dissected what they looked upon, 
and for whom the slightest circumstance was a key 
that opened the whole character to their glance. For 
example : Saint-Simon sees a lady whose seemingly 
ingenuous diffidence makes her charming to everybody. 
He peers into her soul, and declares, as the result of 
his vision, that " modesty is one of her arts." Again, 
after the death of the son of Louis XIV., the court was 
of course overwhelmed with decorous grief; the new 
dauphin and dauphiness were especially inconsolable for 
the loss, and, to all witnesses but one, were weeping 
copiously. Saint-Simon simply says, " Their eyes were 
wonderfully dry, but well managed." Bacon might have 
inferred hypocrisy ; but he would not have observed 
the lack of moisture in the eyes amid all the convulsive 
sobbing and the agonized dips and waves of the handker- 
chiefs. Take another instance. The Duke of Orleans 
amazed the court by the diabolical recklessness of his 
conduct. Saint-Simon alone saw that ordinary vices had 
no pungency for the Duke; that he must spice licentious- 
ness with atheism, blasphemy, and incest, in order to de- 
rive any pleasure from it ; and solves the problem by say- 
ing that he was " born Uase,^' — that he took up vice at 
the point at which his ancestors had left it, and had 
no choice but to carry it to new heights of impudence 



630 BACON. 

or to reject it altogether. Again, — to take an example 
from a practical politician : Shaftesbury, who played 
the game of faction with such exquisite subtlety in the 
reign of Charles II., detected the fact of the secret mar- 
riage between the king's brother and Anne Hyde by 
noticing at dinner that her mother. Lady Clarendon, 
could not avoid expressing a faint deference in her man- 
ner when she helped her daughter to the meat ; and on 
this slight indication he acted as confidently as if he had 
learned the fact by being present at the wedding. 

Now neither in his life nor in his writings does Bacon 
indicate that he had studied individuals with this keen 
attentiveness. His knowledge of human nature was the 
result of the tranquil deposit, year after year, into his 
receptive and capacious intellect, of the facts of history 
and of his own wide experience of various kinds of life. 
These he pondered, classified, reduced to principles, and 
embodied in sentences which have ever since been 
quotable texts for jurists, moralists, historians, and 
statesmen ; and all the while his own servants were de- 
ceiving and plundering him, and his subordinates enrich- 
ing themselves with bribes taken in his name. The 
" small watch-candle " would have been valuable to him 
here. 

The work by which his wisdom has reached the popu- 
lar mind is his collection of Essays. As originally 



BACON. 331 

published in 1597, it contained only ten ; in the last edi- 
tion published in his lifetime, the number was increased to 
fifty-seven. As they were the sifted result of much obser- 
vation and meditation on public and private life, he truly 
could say of their matter, that " it could not be found in 
books." Their originality can hardly be appreciated at 
present, for most of their thoughts have been incorpor- 
ated with the minds which have fed on them, and have 
been continually reproduced in other volumes. Yet 
it is probable that these short treatises are rarely 
thoroughly mastered, even by the most careful reader. 
Dugald Stewart testifies that after reading them for the 
twentieth time he observed something which had es- 
caped his attention on the nineteenth. They combine 
the greatest brevity with the greatest beauty of expres- 
sion. The thoughts follow each other with such rapid 
ease ; each thought is so truly an addition, and not an 
expansion of the preceding ; the point of view is so con- 
tinually changed, in order that in one little essay the 
subject may be considered on all its sides and in all its 
bearings; and each sentence is so capable of being de- 
veloped into an essay, - — that the work requires long 
pauses of reflection, and frequent re-perusal, to be esti- 
mated at its full worth. It not merely enriches the 
mind ; it enlarges it, and teaches it comprehensive habits 
of reflection. The disease of mental narrowness and 



332 BACON. 

fanaticism, it insensibly cures, by showing that every 
subject can be completely apprehended only by viewing 
it from various points ; and a reader of Bacon instinc- 
tively meets the fussy or furious declaimer with the 
objection, " But, sir, there is another side to this mat- 
ter." 

It was one of Bacon's mistakes to believe that he 
would outlive the English language. Those of his 
works, therefore, which were not written in Latin he 
was eager to have translated into that tongue. The 
" Essays," coming home as they did to " men's business 
and bosoms," he was persuaded would " last as long as 
books should last " ; and as he thought — to use his own 
words — " that these modern languages would at some 
time or other play the bankrupt with books," he em- 
ployed Ben Jonson and others to translate the Essays 
into Latin. A Dr. Willmott published, in 1720, a trans- 
lation of this Latin edition into what he called reformed 
and fashionable English. We will give a specimen. 
Bacon, in his Essay on Adversity, says : " Prosperity 
is the blessing of the Old Testament, adversity is the 
blessing of the New Yet even in the Old Testa- 
ment, if you listen to David's harp, you shall hear as 
many hearse-like airs as carols." Dr. Willmott Eng- 
lishes the Latin in this wise : " Prosperity belongs to 
the blessings of the Old Testament, adversity to the 



BACON. 33^ 

beatitudes of the New. . . , . Yet even in the Old 
Testament, if you listen to David's harp, you '11 find 
more lamentable airs than triumphant ones." This is 
translation with a vengeance ! 

Next to the Essays and the Advancement of Learn- 
ing, the most attractive of Bacon's works is his Wisdom 
of the Ancients. Here his reason and imagination, 
intermingling or interchanging their processes, work 
conjointly, and produce a magnificent series of poems, 
while remorselessly analyzing imaginations into ideas. 
He supposes that, anterior to the Greeks, there were 
thinkers as wise as Bacon ; that the heathen fables are 
poetical embodiments of secrets and mysteries of policy, 
philosophy, and religion ; truths folded up in mythologi- 
cal personifications ; " sacred relics," indeed, or " ab- 
stracted, rarefied airs of better times, which by tradi- 
tion from more ancient nations fell into the trumpets 
and flutes of the Grecians." He, of course, finds in 
these fables what he brings to them, the inductive phi- 
losophy and all. The book is a marvel of ingenuity, 
and exhibits the astounding analogical power of his 
mind, both as respects analogies of reason and analogies 
of fancy. Had Bacon lived in the age of Plato and 
Aristotle, and written this work, he would have fairly 
triumphed over those philosophers ; for he would have 
reconciled ancient philosophy with ancient religion, 



334 BACON. 

and made faith in Jupiter and Pan consistent with 
reason. 

But the work in which Bacon is most pleasingly ex- 
hibited is his philosophical romance, The New Atlantis. 
This happy island is a Baconian Utopia, a philosopher's 
paradise, where the Novum Organum is, in imagina- 
tion, realized, and utility is carried to its loftiest idealiza- 
tion. In this country the king is good, and the people 
are good, because everything, even commerce, is sub. 
ordinated to knowledge. "Truth" here "prints goods 
ness." All sensual and malignant passions, all the ugly 
deformities of actual life, are sedately expelled from this 
glorious dream of a kingdom where men live in har- 
mony with each other and with nature, and where ob- 
servers, discoverers, and inventors are invested with an 
external pomp and dignity and high place corresponding 
to their intellectual elevation. Here is a college worthy 
of the name, Solomon's House, " the end of whose foun- 
dation is the knowledge of causes and the secret motions 
of thmgs, and the enlarging the bounds of human em- 
pire to the effecting of iall things possible " ; and in 
Solomon's House Bacon's ideas are carried out, and man 
is in the process of " being restored to the sovereignty 
of nature.'' In this fiction, too, the peculiar benevolence 
of Bacon's spirit is displayed ; and perhaps the finest 
sentence in his writings, certainly the one which best 



BACON. 335 

indicates the essential feeling of his soul as he regarded 
human misery and ignorance, occurs in his descrip- 
tion of one of the fathers of Solomon's House. " His 
countenance," he says, " was as the countenance of one 
who pities men." 

But, it may still be asked, how was it that a man of 
such large wisdom, with a soul of such pervasive be- 
neficence, was so comparatively weak and pliant in his 
life ? This question touches his intellect no less than 
his character ; and it must be said that, both in the ac- 
tion of his mind and the actions of his life, there is ob- 
servable a lack of emotional as well as of moral intensity. 
He is never impassioned, never borne away by an over- 
mastering feeling or purpose. There is no rush of ideas 
and passions in his writings, no direct contact and close 
hug of thought and thing. Serenity, not speed, is his 
characteristic. Majestic as is the movement of his in- 
tellect, and far-reaching its glance, it still includes, ad- 
justs, /ee/s i7ito the objects it contemplates, rather than 
darts at them like Shakespeare's or pierces them like 
Chaucer's. And this intelligence, so wise and so worldly- 
wise, so broad, bright, confident, and calm, with the 
moral element pervading it as an element of insight 
rather than as a motive of action, — this was the instru- 
ment on which he equally relied to advance learning 
and to advance Bacon. As a practical politician, he felt 



336 BACON. 

assured of his power to compreliend as a whole, and 
nicely to discern the separate parts of, the most compli- 
cated matter which pressed for judgment and for voli- 
tion. Exercising insight and foresight on a multitude 
of facts and contingencies all present to his mind at 
once, he aimed to evoke order from confusion, to read 
events in their principles, to seize the salient point which 
properly determines the judgment, and then to act de- 
cisively for his purpose, safely for his reputation and 
fortune. Marvellous as this process of intelligence is, it 
is liable both to corrupt and mislead unless the moral 
sentiment be strong and controlling. The man trans- 
forms himself into a sort of earthly Providence, and by 
intellio-ence believes himself emancipated from strict in- 
tegrity. But the intellectual eye, even when capable, like 
Bacon's, of being dilated at will, is no substitute for con- 
science, and no device has ever been invented which 
would do away with the usefulness of simple honesty and 
blind moral instinct. In the most comprehensive view in 
politics, something is sure to be left out, and that some- 
thing is apt to vitiate the sagacity of the whole combi- 
nation. 

Indeed, there is such a thing as being over- wise, in 
dealing with practical affairs, and the defect of Bacon's 
intellect is seen the moment we compare it with an in- 
tellect like that of Luther. Bacon, with his serene 



BACON. 337 

superiority to impulse, and his power of giving his 
mind at pleasure its close compactness or fan-like 
spread, could hardly have failed to feel for Luther that 
compassionate contempt with which men possessing 
many ideas survey men who are possessed by one ; yet 
it is certain that Luther never could have got entangled 
in Bacon's errors, for his habit was to cut knots which 
Bacon labored to untie. Men of Luther's stamp never 
aim to be wise by reach, but by intensity, of intelligence. 
They catch a vivid glimpse of some awful spiritual fact, 
in whose light the world dwindles and pales, and then 
follow its inspiration headlong, paying no heed to the 
insinuating whispers of prudence, and crashing through 
the glassy expediencies which obstruct their path. 
Such natures, in the short run, are the most visionary ; 
in the long run, the most practical. Bacon has been 
praised by the most pertinacious revilers of his character 
for his indifference to the metaphysical and theological 
controversies which raged around him. They seem 
not to see that this indifference came from his de- 
ficiency in the intense moral and religious feelings out 
of which those controversies arose. It would have been 
better for himself had he been more of a fanatic; for 
such a stretch of intelligence as he possessed could be 
purchased only at the expense of diffusing the forces 
of his personality in meditative expansiveness, and of 
15 V 



338 BACON. 

weakening his power of dealing direct blows on the in- 
stinct or intuition of the moment. 

But, while this man was without the austerer virtues 
of humanity, we must not forget that he was also with- 
out its sour and malignant vices ; and he stands almost 
alone in literature, as a vast, dispassionate intellect, in 
which the sentiment of philanthropy has been refined 
and purified into the subtile essence of thought. With- 
out this philanthropy or goodness, he tells us, " man is 
but a better kind of vermin " ; and love of mankind, with 
Bacon, is not merely the noblest feeling but the highest 
reason. This beneficence, thus transformed into intelli- 
gence, is not a hard opinion, but a rich and mellow 
spirit of humanity, which communicates the life of the 
quality it embodies ; and we cannot more fitly conclude 
than by quoting the noble sentence in which Baccn, after 
pointing out the common mistakes regarding the true end 
of knowledge, closes by divorcing it from all selfish ego- 
tism and ambition. " Men," he says, " have entered 
into a desire of learning and knowledge, sometimes upon 
a natural curiosity and inquisitive appetite ; sometimes 
to entertain their minds with variety and delight ; some- 
times for ornament and reputation ; and sometimes to 
enable them to victory of wit and contradiction ; and 
most times for lucre and profession ; and seldom sin- 
cerely, to give a true account of their gift of reason, to 



BACON. 339 

the benefit and use of man : as if there were sought 
in knowledge a couch whereupon to rest a searching and 
restless spirit ; or a terrace for a wandering and varia- 
ble mind to walk up and down with a fair prospect ; or a 
tower of state, for a proud mind to raise itself upon ; or 
a fort or commanding-ground for strife or contention ; 
or a shop for profit and sale ; and not a rich storehouse, 
for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's 
estate." 



HOOKEE. 

rpiHE life of the " learned and judicious " Mr. Rich- 
ard Hooker, by Izaak Walton, is one of the most 
perfect biographies of its kind in literature. But it is 
biography on its knees ; and though it contains some 
exquisite touches of characterization, it does not, per- 
haps, convey an adequate impression of the energy and 
enlargement of the soul whose meekness it so tenderly 
and reverentially portrays. The individuality of the 
writer is blended with that of his subject, and much of 
his representation of Hooker is an unconscious ideali- 
zation of himself. The intellectual limitations of Wal- 
ton are felt even while we are most charmed by the 
sweetness of his spirit, and the mind of the greatest 
thinker the Church of England has produced is not re- 
flected on the page which celebrates his virtues. 

Hooker's life is the record of the upward growth of a 
human nature into that reoi'ion of sentiments and ideas 
where sagacity and sanctity, intelligence and goodness, 
are but different names for one vital fact. His soul, 
and the character his soul had organized, — the invisi- 
ble but intensely and immortally alive part of him, — 



HOOKEE. 341 

was domesticated away up in the heavens, even while 
the weak visible frame, which seemed to contain it, 
walked the earth ; and though in this world thrown 
controversially, at least, into the Church Militant, the 
Church Militant caught, through him, a gleam of the 
consecrating radiance, and a glimpse of the heaven- 
wide ideas, of the Church Triumphant. There is much 
careless talk, in our day, of " spiritual " communication ; 
but it must never be forgotten that the condition of real 
spiritual communication is height of soul ; and that the 
true " mediums " are those rare persons through whom, 
as through Hooker, spiritual communications stream, in 
the conceptions of purified, spiritualized, celestialized 
reason. 

Hooker was born in 1553, and was the son of poor 
parents, better qualified to rejoice in his early piety than 
to appreciate his early intelligence. The schoolmaster 
to whom the boy was sent, happy in a pupil whose in- 
quisitive and acquisitive intellect was accompanied with 
docility of temper, believed him, in the words of Wal- 
ton, " to be blessed with an inward divine light " ; thought 
him a little wonder ; and when his parents expressed 
their intention to bind him apprentice to some trade, the 
good man spared no efforts until he succeeded in inter- 
esting Bishop Jewell in the stripling genius. Hooker, 
at the age of fourteen, was sent by Jewell to the Uni- 



342 HOOKEE. 

versity of Oxford ; and after Jewell's death Dr. Sandys, 
the Bishop of London, became his patron. He partly 
supported himself at the university by taking pupils; 
arid though these pupils were of his own age, they seem 
to have regarded their young instructor with as much 
reverence as they gave to the venerable professors, 
and a great deal more love. Two of these pupils, Ed- 
win Sandys and George Cranmer, rose to distinction. 
As a teacher, Hooker communicated not merely the re- 
sults of study, but the spirit of study ; some radiations 
from his own soul fell upon the minds he informed ; and 
the youth fortunate enough to be his pupil might have 
echoed the grateful eulogy of the poet : — 

" For he was like the sun, givmg me Hght, 
Pourmg into the caves of my young brain 
Knowledge from his bright fountains." 

No one, perhaps, was better prepared to enter holy 
orders than Hooker, when, after fourteen years of the 
profoundest meditation and the most exhaustive study, 
he, in his twenty-eighth year, was made deacon and 
priest. And now came the most unfortunate event of 
his life ; and it came in consequence of an honor. He 
was appointed to preach at St. Paul's Cross, a puli3it cross 
erected in the churchyard of St. Paul's Cathedral, and 
from which a sermon was preached every Sunday by 
some eminent divine, before an assemblage composed of 



HOOKER. 343 

the Court, the city magistracy, and a great crowd of peo- 
ple. When Hooker arrived in London on Thursday, 
he was afflicted with so severe a cold that he despaired 
of being able to use his voice on Sunday. His host 
was a linen-draper by the name of Churchman ; and the 
wife of this man took such care of her clerical guest, 
that his cold was sufficiently cured to enable him to 
preach his sermon. Before he could sufficiently express 
his gratitude, she proposed further to increase her claim 
upon it. Mrs. Churchman — unlike the rest of her sex 
— was a match-maker j and she represented to him that 
he, being of a weak constitution, ought to have a wife 
who would prove a nurse to him, and thus, by affection- 
ate care, prolong his existence, and make it comfortable. 
Her benevolence not stopping here, she offered to pro- 
vide such a one for him herself, if he thought fit to 
marry. The good man, who had, in his sermon, deemed 
himself capable of arguing the question of two wills in 
God, " an antecedent and a consequent will, — his first 
will, that all men should be saved ; his second, that those 
only should be saved who had lived answerable to the 
degree of grace afforded them," — a subject large 
enough to convulse the theological world, — the good 
man listened to Mrs. Churchman w^ith a more serene trust- 
fulness than he would have listened to an Archbishop, 
and gave her power to select such a nurse-wife for him : 



344 HOOKEK. 

he, the thinker and scholar, — who, in the sweep of his 
mind through human learning, had probably never en- 
countered an intelligence capable of deceiving his own, — 
falling blandly into the toils of an ignorant, cunning, and 
low-minded match-maker ! This benevolent lady had a 
daughter, whose manners were vulgar, whose face was 
unprepossessing, whose temper was irritable and exact- 
ing, but who had youth, and romance enough to discrimi- 
nate between being married and going out to service ; 
and this was the wife Mrs. Churchman selected, and this 
was the wife gratefully and guilelessly received from 
her hands by the "judicious Mr. Hooker." Izaak Wal- 
ton moralizes sweetly and sedately over this transaction, 
taking the ground that it was providential, and that 
affliction is a divine diet imposed by God on souls that 
he loves. Is this the right way to look at it ? Every- 
thing is providential after it has happened ; but retribu- 
tion is in the events of providence, as well as chastening. 
Hooker, in truth, had unconsciously slipped into a sin ; 
for he had intended a marriage of convenience, and that 
of the worst sort. He had violated all the providential 
conditions implied in the sacred relation of marriage. 
It was a marriage in which there was no mutual affec- 
tion, no assurance of mutual help, no union of souls ^ 
and as he took his wife to be his nurse, what won- 
der that she preferred the more natural office of 



HOOKER. 345 

vixen ? And though every man and woman who reads 
the account of the manner in which she tormented him 
thinks she deserved to have had some mechanical con- 
trivance attached to her shoulders which should box 
her ears at every scolding word she uttered, it seems to 
be overlooked that great original injustice was done to 
her. We take much delight in being the first who has 
ever said a humane word for the wzjudicious Mrs. 
Hooker. Married, but not mated, to that angelic intel- 
lect and that meek spirit, — taken as a servant more 
than as a wife, — she felt the degradation of her position 
keenly ; and, there being no possibility of equality be- 
tween them, she, in spiritual self-defence, established in 
the household the despotism of caprice and the tyranny 
of the tongue. 

His marriage compelled Hooker to resign his fellow- 
ship at Oxford ; and he accepted a small parish in the 
diocese of Lincoln. Here, about a year afterwards, he 
was visited by his two former pupils, Edwin Sandys and 
George Cranmer. It was sufficient for Mrs. Hooker t& 
know that they were scholars, and that they revered her 
husband. She accordingly at once set in motion certain 
petty feminine modes of annoyance, to indicate that her 
husband was her servant, and that his friends were un- 
welcome guests. As soon as they were fairly engaged 
in conversation, recalling and living over the quiet 
15* 



346 HOOKEE. 

joys of their college life, the amiable lady that Mr. 
Hooker had married to be his nurse called him sharply 
to come and rock the cradle. His friends were all but 
turned out of the house. Cranmer, in parting with 
him, said : " Good tutor, I am sorry that your lot is 
fallen in no better ground as to your parsonage ; and 
more sorry that your wife proves not a more comfortable 
companion, after you have wearied yourself in your 
restless studies." " My dear George," was Hooker's 
answer, " if saints have usually a double share in the 
miseries of this life, I, that am none, ought not to re- 
pine at what my wise Creator hath appointed for me, 
but labor — as indeed I do daily — to submit mine to 
his will, and possess my soul in patience and peace." Is 
it not to be supposed that John Calvin, if placed in 
similar circumstances, would have shown a little more 
of the ancient Adam ? Would it not have been some- 
what dangerous for Catherine, wife of Martin Luther, 
to have screamed to her husband to come and rock the 
cradle while he was discoursing with Melancthon on the 
insufficiency of works ? 

One result of this visit of his pupils was that Sandys, 
whose father was Archbishop of York, warmly repre- 
sented to that dignitary of the Church the scandal of 
allowing such a combination of the saint and sage as 
Richard Hooker to be buried in a small country parson- 



HOOKER. 347 

age ; and, the mastership of the Temple falling vacant 
at this time, the Archbishop used his influence with the 
judges and benchers, and in March, 1585, obtained 
the place for Hooker. But this promotion was destined 
to give him new disquiets, rather than diminish old ones. 
The lecturer who preached the evening sermons at 
the Temple was Walter Travers, — an able, learned, 
and resolute theologian, who preferred the Presbyterian 
form of church-government to the Episcopal, and who, 
in his theological belief, agreed with the Puritans. It 
soon came to be noted that the sermon by Hooker in 
the morning disagreed, both as to doctrine and disci- 
pline, with the sermon delivered by his subaltern in the 
evening ; and it was wittily said that " the forenoon 
sermon spake Canterbury and the afternoon Geneva." 
This difference soon engaged public attention. Canter- 
bury stepped in, and prohibited Geneva from preaching. 
Travers appealed unsuccessfully to the Privy Council, 
and then his friends privately printed his petition. 
Hooker felt himself compelled to answer it. As the 
controversy refers to deep mysteries of religion, still 
vehemently debated, it would be impertinent to venture 
a judgment on the relative merits of the disputants ; 
but it may be said that the reasoning of Hooker, when 
the discussion does not turn on the meaning of authori- 
tative Scripture texts, insinuates itself with more sub- 



348 HOOKER. 

tile cogency into the natural heart and brain, and is 
incomparably more human and humane, than the reason- 
ing of his antagonist. A fine intellectual contempt 
steals out in Hooker's rejoinder to the charges of Trav- 
ers regarding some minor ceremonies, for which the 
Puritans, in their natural jealousy of everything that 
seemed popish, had, perhaps, an irrational horror, and 
to wliich the Churchmen were apt to give an equally 
irrational importance. Hooker quietly refers to " other 
exceptions, so like these, as but to name I should have 
thought a greater fault than to commit them." One 
retort has acquired deserved celebrity : " Your next 
argument consists of railing and reasons. To your rail- 
ing I say nothing ; to your reasons I say what follows." 
It was unfortunate for Hooker's logic that it was sup- 
ported by the arm of power. Travers had the great 
advantage of being persecuted ; and his numerous 
friends in the Temple found ways to make Hooker so 
uncomfortable that he wished himself back in his se- 
cluded parish, with nobody to torment him but his wife. 
He was a great controversialist, as far as reason enters 
into controversies ; but the passions which turn contro- 
versies into contentions, and edge arguments with invec- 
tive, were foreign to his serenely capacious intellect 
and peaceable disposition. As he brooded over the con- 
dition of the Church and the disputes raging within it, 



HOOKER. 349 

he more and more felt the necessity of surveying the 
whole controversy from a higher ground, in larger rela- 
tions, and in a more Christian spirit. So far, the 
dispute raged within, and had not rent, the Church. 
The Puritans were not dissenters, attacking the Church 
from without, but reformers, attempting to alter its con- 
stitution from within. The idea occurred to Hooker, 
that a treatise might be written, demonstrating " the 
power of the Church to make canons for the use of 
ceremonies, and by law to impose obedience to them, as 
upon her children," — written with sufficient compre- 
hensiveness of thought and learning to convince the 
reason of his opponents, and with sufficient comprehen- 
siveness of love to engage their affections. This idea 
ripened into the Ecclesiastical Polity. He began this trea- 
tise at the Temple ; but he found that the theological at- 
mosphere of the place, though it stimulated the intellectual, 
was ungenial to the loving qualities he intended to em- 
body in his treatise ; and he therefore begged the Arch- 
bishop to transfer him to some quiet parsonage, where 
he might think in peace. Accordingly, in 1591, he re- 
ceived the Kectory of Boscum; and afterwards, in 1595, 
the Queen, who seems to have held him in great respect, 
presented him with the living of Bourne, where he re- 
mained until his death, which occurred in the year 1600, 
in his forty-sixth year. In 1594 four books of the Ec- 



350 HOOKEK. 

clesiastical Polity were published, and a fifth in 1597 ; 
the others not till after his death. Walton gives a most 
beautiful picture of him in his parsonage, illustrating 
Hooker's own maxim, " that the life of a pious clergy- 
man is visible rhetoric." His humility, benevolence, 
self-denial, devotion to his duties, the innocent wisdom 
which marked his whole intercourse with his parish- 
ioners, and his fasting and mortifications, are all set 
forth in Walton's blandest diction. The most surprising 
item in this list of perfections is the last ; for how, with 
" the clownish and silly " Mrs. Hooker always snarling 
and snapping below, while he was looking into the 
empyrean of ideas from the summits of his intellect, he 
needed any more of the discipline of mortification, it 
would puzzle the most resolute ascetic to tell. That 
amiable lady, as soon as she understood that her hus- 
band was opposed to the Puritans, seems to have joined 
them ; spite, and the desire to plague him, appearing to 
inspire her with an unwonted interest in theology, 
though we have no record of her theological genius, 
except the apparently erroneous report that, after 
Hooker's death, she destroyed or mutilated some of his 
manuscripts. In Keble's Preface to his edition of 
Hooker's Works will be found an elaborate account 
of the publication of the last three books of the Ec- 
clesiastical Polity, and an examination and approximate 



HOOKER. - 351 

settlement of the question regarding their authenticity 
and completeness. 

Hooker's nature was essentially an intellectual one; 
and the wonder of his mental biography is the celerity 
and certainty with which he transmuted knowledge and 
experience into intelligence. It may be a fancy, but 
we think it can be detected in an occasional uncharac- 
teristic tartness of expression, that he had carried up 
even Mrs. Hooker into the region of his intellect, and 
dissolved her termagant tongue into a fine spiritual 
essence of gentle sarcasm. Not only did his vast learn- 
ing pass, as successively acquired, from memory into 
faculty, but the daily beauty of his life left its finest and 
last result in his brain. His patience, humility, dis- 
interestedness, self-denial, his pious and humane senti- 
ments, every resistance to temptation, every benevolent 
act, every holy prayer, were by some subtile chemistry 
turned into thought, and gave his intellect an upward 
lift, — increasing the range of its vision, and bringing it 
into closer proximity with great ideas. We cannot read 
a page of his writings, without feeling the presence of 
this spiritual power in conception, statement, and argu- 
ment. And this moral excellence, which has thus 
become moral intelligence, this holiness which is in per- 
fect union with reason, this spirit of love which can not 
only feel but see, gives a softness, richness, sweetness, 



352 HOOKER. 

and warmth to his thinking, quite as peculiar to it as its 
dignity, amplitude, and elevation. 

As a result of this deep, silent, and rapid growth of 
nature, this holding in his intelligence all the results 
of his emotional and moral life, he attaches our sympa- 
thies as we follow the stream of his arguments ; for we 
feel that he has communed with all the principles he 
communicates, and knows by direct perception the spir- 
itual realities he announces. His intellect, accordingly, 
does not act by intuitive flashes ; but " his soul has 
sight " of eternal verities, and directs at them a clear, 
steady, divining gaze. He has no lucky thoughts; 
everything is earned ; he knows what he knows, in all 
its multitudinous relations, and cannot be surprised by 
sudden objections, convicting him of oversight of even 
the minutest application of any principle he holds in his 
calm, strong grasp. And as a controversialist he ha? 
the immense advantage of descending into the field of 
controversy from a height above it, and commanding it, 
while his opponents are wrangling with their minds on a 
level with it. The great difficulty in the man of thought 
is, to connect his thought with life ; and half the litera' 
ture of theology and morals is therefore mere satire, 
simply exhibiting the immense, unbridged, ironic gulf 
that yawns, wide as that between Lazarus and Dives, 
between truth and duty on the one hand and the actual 



HOOKER. 353 

affairs and conduct of the world on the other. But 
Hooker, one of the loftiest of thinkers, was also one 
of the most practical. His shining idea, away up in 
the heaven of contemplation, sends its rays of light 
and warmth in a thousand directions upon the earth ; 
illuminating palace and cottage ; piercing into the crevi- 
ces and corners of concrete existence ; relating the high 
with the low, austere obligation with feeble perform- 
ance ; and showing the obscure tendencies of imperfect 
institutions to realize divine laws. 

This capacious soul was lodged in one of the feeblest 
of bodies. Physiologists are never weary of telling us 
that masculine health is necessary to vigor of mind ; 
but the vast mental strength of Hooker was inde- 
pendent of his physical constitution. His appearance 
in the pulpit conveyed no idea of a great man. Small 
in stature, with a low voice, using no gesture, never 
moving his person or lifting his eyes from his ser- 
mon, he seemed the very embodiment of clerical in- 
capacity and dulness : but soon the thoughtful listener 
found his mind fascinated by the automaton speaker ; 
a still, devout ecstasy breathed from the pallid lips ; the 
profoundest thought and the most extensive learning 
found calm expression in the low accents ; and, more 
surprising still, the somewhat rude mother-tongue of 
Engli^^hmen was heard for the first time from the lips 

w 



354 HOOKER. 

of a master of prose composition, demonstrating its 
capacity for all the purposes of the most refined and 
most enlarged philosophic thought. Indeed, the serene 
might of Hooker's soul is perhaps most obviously per- 
ceived in his style, — in the easy power with which he 
wields and bends to his purpose a language not yet 
trained into a ready vehicle of philosophic expression. 
It is doubtful if any English writer since his time has 
shown equal power in the construction of long sen- 
tences, — those sentences in which the thought, and the 
atmosphere of the thought, and the modifications of the 
thought, are all included in one sweeping period, which 
gathers clause after clause as it rolls melodiously on 
to its foreseen conclusion, having the general gravity 
and grandeur of its modulated movement pervaded by 
an inexpressibly sweet undertone of individual senti- 
ment. And his strength is free from every fretful and 
morbid quality such as commonly taint the performances 
of a strong mind lodged in a sickly body. It is as 
serene, wholesome, and comprehensive, as it is powerful. 
The Ecclesiastical Polity is the great theological 
work of the Elizabethan age. Pope Clement having 
said to Cardinal Allen and Dr. Stapleton, English Ro- 
man Catholics at Rome, that he had never met with an 
English book whose writer deserved the name of author, 
they replied that a poor, obscure English priest had 



HOOKER. 355 

written a work on church pohty, which if he sliould 
read would change his opinion. At the conclusion of 
the first book, the Pope is said to have delivered this 
judgment : " There is no learning that this man hath 
not searched into, nothing too hard for his understand- 
ing. This man indeed deserves the name of an author ; 
his books will get reverence from age ; for there is in 
them such seeds of eternity, that, if the rest be like this, 
they shall last until the last fire consume all learning." 
But it must be admitted that the rest, however great 
their merits, are not " hke this." The first book of tUfe 
Ecclesiastical Polity is not only the best, but it is that 
in which Hooker's mind is most effectually brought into 
relation with all thinking minds, and that in virtue of 
which he takes his high place in the history of litera- 
ture and philosophy. The theologians he opposed in- 
sisted that a definite scheme of church polity was 
revealed in the Scriptures, and was obligatory on Chris- 
tians. This, of course, reduced the controversy to a 
mere wrangle about the meaning of certain texts ; and, 
as this mode of disputation does not make any call upon 
the higher mental and spiritual powers, it has always 
been popular among theologians, — giving everybody a 
chance in the textual and logical skirmish, and condu- 
cing to that anarchy of opinions which is not without its 
charm to the sternest champion of authority, if he has in 



356 HOOKER. 

him the belHgerent instinct. But Hooker, constitution 
ally averse to controversy, and looking at it, not as an 
end, but a means, had that aching for order which char- 
acterizes a peaceable spirit, and that demand for funda- 
mental ideas which characterizes a great mind. Ac- 
cordingly, in the first book, he mounts above the con- 
troversy before entering into it, and surveys the whole 
question of law, from the one eternal. Divine Law to the 
laws which are in force among men. He makes the 
laws which God has written in the reason of man divine 
laws, as well as those he has supernaturally revealed 
in the Scriptures ; and especially he enforces the some- 
what startling principle, that law is variable or invaria- 
ble, not according to the source from which it emanates, 
but according to the matter to which it refers. If the 
matter be changeable, be mutable, the law must partici- 
pate in the mutability of that which it was designed to 
regulate ; and this principle, he insists, is independent 
of the fact whether the law originated in God or in the 
divinely constituted reason of man. There are some 
laws which God has written in the reason of man which 
are immutable ; there are some laws supernaturally 
revealed in Scripture which are mutable. In the first 
case, no circumstance can justify their violation , in the 
other, circumstances necessitate a change. The bearing 
of this principle on the right of the Church of England 



HOOKER. 357 

to command rules and ceremonies which might not have 
been commanded by Scripture is plain. Even if the 
principle were denied by his opponents, it could be 
properly denied only by being confuted ; and to confute 
it exacted the lifting up of the controversy into the 
jregion of ideas. 

But it is not so much in the conception and appli- 
cation of one principle, as in the exhibition of many 
principles harmoniously related, that Hooker's largeness 
of comprehension is shown. No other great logician is 
so free from logical fanaticism. His mind gravitates to 
truth ; and it therefore limits and guards the application 
of single truths^ detecting that fine point where many 
principles unite in forming wisdom, and refusing to be 
pushed too far in any one direction. He has his hands 
on the reins of a hundred wild horses, unaccustomed to 
exercise their strength and fleetness in joint effort ; but 
the moment they feel the might of his meekness, they 
all sedately obey the directing power which sends them 
in orderly motion to a common goal. The central idea 
of his book is law. Even God, he contends, " works 
not only according tp his own will^ but the counsel 
of his own will," according " to the order which 
he before all ages hath set down for himself to do all 
things by." A self-conscious, personal, working, divine 
reason is therefore at the heart of things^ and infinite 



358 HOOKER. 

power and infinite love are identical with infinite intelli- 
gence. Hooker's breadth of mind is evinced in his refus- 
ing, unlike most theologians, to emphasize and detach any 
one of these divine perfections, whether it be power, or 
love, or intelligence. Intelligence is in power and love ; 
power and love are in intelligence. 

It would be impossible, in our short space, to trace 
the descent of Hooker's central idea of law to its appli- 
cations to men and states. The law which the angels 
obey, the law of nature, the law which binds man as an 
individual, the law which binds him as member of a 
politic community, the law which bmds him as a mem- 
ber of a religious community, the law which binds na- 
tions in their mutual relations, — all are exhibited with 
a force and clearness of vision, a mastery of ethical 
and political philosophy, a power of dealing with rela- 
tive as well as absolute truth, and a sagacity of practi- 
cal observation, which are remarkable both in their 
separate excellence and their exquisite combination. 
To this comprehensive treatise Agassiz tlie naturalist. 
Story the jurist, Webster the statesman. Garrison the 
reformer, could all go for principles, and for applications 
of principles. He appreciates, beyond any other thinker 
who has taken his stand on the Higher Law, but who 
still believes in the binding force of the laws of men, 
the difficulty of making an individual, to whom that Law 



HOOKEE. 359 

is revealed through reason, a member of a politic or re- 
ligious community ; and he admits that the best men, 
individually, are often those who are apt to be most un- 
manageable in their relations to state and church. The 
argument he addresses to such minds, though it may not 
be conclusive, is probably the least unsatisfactory that 
has ever been framed ; for it is presented in connection 
with all that he has previously said in regard to the 
binding force of the divine law. 

Of this divine law, — the law which angels obey ; the 
law of love ; the law which binds in virtue of its power 
to allure and attract, and which weds obligation to ec- 
stasy, — of this law he thus speaks in language which 
seems touched with a consecrating radiance : — 

" But now that we may lift up our eyes (as it were) 
from the footstool to the throne of God, and, leaving 
these natural, consider a little the state of heavenly and 
divine creatures : touching angels, which are spirits im- 
material and intellectual, the glorious inhabitants of 
those sacred palaces, where nothing but light and 
blessed immortality, no shadow of matter for tears, dis- 
contentments, griefs, and uncomfortable passions to work 
upon, but all joy, tranquillity, and peace, even for ever 
and ever doth dwell : as in number and order they are 
huge, mighty, and royal armies, so likewise in perfec- 
tion of obedience unto that law, which the Highest, 



360 HOOKER. 

whom thej adore, love, and imitate, hath imposed upon 
them, such observants they are thereof, that our Sav- 
iour himself, being to set down the perfect idea of that 
which we are to pray and wish for on earth, did not 
teach to pray and wish for more than only that here it 
might be with us as with them it is in heaven. God, 
which moveth mere natural agents as an efficient only, 
doth otherwise move intellectual creatures, and especially 
his holy angels : for, beholding the face of God, in admi- 
ration of so great excellency they all adore him ; and, be- 
ing rapt with the love of his beauty, they cleave insepara- 
bly forever unto him. Desire to resemble him in good^ 
ness maketh them unweariable, and even insatiable, in 
their longing to do by all means all manner of good unto 
all the creatures of God, but especially unto the children 
of men : in the countenance of whose nature, looking 
downward, they behold themselves beneath themselves ; 
even as upward, in God, beneath whom themselves are, 
they see that character which is nowhere but in them- 
selves and us resembled Angelical actions may, 

therefore, be reduced unto these three general kinds : 
first, most delectable love, arising from the visible ap- 
prehension of the purity, glory, and beauty of God, in- 
visible saving only to spirits that are pure ; secondly, 
adoration, grounded upon the evidence of the greatness of 
God, on whom they see how all things depend ; thirdly, 



HOOKER. 861 

imitation, bred by the presence of Ms exemplary good- 
ness, who ceaseth not before them daily to fill heaven 
and earth with the rich treasures of most free and unde- 
served grace." 

And though the concluding passage of the first book 
of the Ecclesiastical Polity has been a thousand times 
quoted, it would be unjust to Hooker not here to cite the 
sentence which most perfectly embodies his soul : — 

" Wherefore, that here we may briefly end : of law 
there can be no less acknowledged, than that her seat is 
the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world : 
all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very 
least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not ex- 
empted from her power ; both angels and men and 
creatures of what condition soever, though each in differ- 
ent sort and manner, yet all with uniform consent, ad- ' 
miring her as the mother of their peace and their joy." 

In concluding these essays on the Literature of the 
Age of Elizabeth, let us pass rapidly in review the 
writers to whom they have referred. And first for the 
dramatists, whose works — in our day on the dissecting- 
tables of criticism, but in their own all alive with intel- 
lect and passion — made the theatres of Elizabeth and 
James rock and ring with the clamors or plaudits of a 
mob too excited to be analytic. Of these professors of 
16 



362 HOOKER. 

the science of human nature, we have attempted to por« 
tray the fiery imagination that flames through the fus- 
tian and animal fierceness of Marlowe ; the bluff arro- 
gance of the outspoken Jonson, with his solid understand- 
ing, caustic humor, delicate fancy, and undeviating be- 
lief in Ben ; the close observation and teeming mother- 
wit which found vent in the limpid verse of Heywood ; 
Middleton's sardonic sagacity, and Marston's envenomed 
satire ; the suffering, and the soaring and singing cheer, 
the beggary and the benignity, so quaintly united in 
Dekkar's vagrant life and sunny genius ; Webster's be- 
wildering terror, and Chapman's haughty aspiration ; 
the subtile sentiment of Beaumont ; the fertile, flashing, 
and ebullient spirit of Fletcher ; the easy dignity of 
Massinger's thinking, and the sonorous majesty of his 
style ; the fastidious elegance and melting tenderness 
of Ford ; and the one-souled, " myriad-minded " Shake- 
speare, who is so unmistakably beyond them all. 

Then, recurring to the undramatic poets, we have en- 
deavored to catch a glimpse of the fairy-land of Spen- 
ser's celestialized imagination ; and lightly to touch on 
the characteristics of the poets who preceded and fol- 
lowed him; on the sternly serious and unjoyous cre- 
ativeness of Sackville ; the meditative fulness and 
tender fancy of " well-languaged " Daniel ; the enthusias- 
tic expansiveness of description, and pure, bright, and 



HOOKER. 363 

vigorous diction of Drayton ; the sententious sharpness 
of Hall ; the clear imaginative insight and dialectic felici- 
ty of Davies ; the metaphysical voluptuousness and witty 
unreason of Donne ; the genial, thoughtful, well-propor- 
tioned soul of Wotton ; the fantastic devoutness of Her- 
bert; and the coarsely frenzied commonplaces of Warner, 

*' Who stood 
Up to the chin in the Pierian " — mud! 

Again, in Sidney we have striven to portray genius 
and goodness as expressed in behavior ; in Raleigh, 
genius and audacity as expressed in insatiable, though 
somewhat equivocal, activity of arm and brain ; in Ba- 
con, the beneficence and the autocracy of an intellect 
whose comprehensiveness needs no celebration ; and 
in Hooker, the passage of holiness into intelligence, and 
the spirit of love into the power of reason. 

And, in attempting to delineate so many diverse indi- 
vidualities, we have been painfully conscious of another 
and more difficult audience than that we address. The 
imperial intellects, — the Bacons, Hookers, Shake- 
speares, and Spensers, the men who on earth are as 
much alive now as they were two hundred and fifty 
years ago, — are, in their assured intellectual dominion, 
blandly careless of the judgments of individuals ; but 
there is a large class of writers whose genius we have 
considered, who have well-nigh passed away from the 



364 HOOKEE. 

protecting admiration and affectionate memory of gen- 
eral readers. As we, more or less roughly, handled 
these, as we felt the pulse of life throbbing in every 
time-stained and dust-covered volume, - — dust out of 
which Man was originally made, and to which Man, as 
author, is commonly so sure to return, — the books re- 
sumed their original form of men, became personal 
forces, to resent impeachments of their honor, or miscon- 
ceptions of their genius ; and a troop of Spirits stalked 
from the neglected pages to confront their irreverent 
critic. There they were, — ominous or contemptuous 
judges of the person who assumed to be their judge : 
on the faces of some, sarcastic denial ; on others, tender 
reproaches ; on others, benevolent pity ; on others, se- 
renely beautiful indifference or disdain. " Who taught 
you," their looks seemed to say, " to deliver dogmatic 
judgments on us ? What know you of our birth, cul- 
ture, passions, temptations, struggles, motives, two hun- 
dred years ago ? What right have you, to blame ? 
What qualifications have you, to praise ? Let us abide 
in our earthly oblivion, — in our immortal life. It is 
sufficient that our works demonstrated on earth the 
inextinguishable vitality of the Soul that glowed within 
us ; and, for the rest, we have long passed to the only 
infallible — the Almighty — critic and judge of works 
and of men I " 



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